Hands up
YAHAnet pulls of an impressive show of hands at IAS 2012 and follows it up with a lively virtual exhibit.
The photo mosaic above (created by the YAHAnet team using AndreaMosaic) is made up of all the scanned hand photo messages of the people who participated in this project at the IAS 2012 YAHAnet booth!
What do the hands of 313 people visiting Washington DC tell you? A lot if they were visitors to the YAHAnet booth at the International AIDS Society's conference in July 2012. But you don’t have to have been there to see the evidence, because the good folks at YAHAnet brought it all home.
Here’s how their website describes what they did “From July 22 to 27, 2012, YAHAnet ran an interactive booth (#633) in the Global Village of the XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012). Chandra, Lukas, and John of the YAHAnet team met and had wonderful discussions with amazing youth leaders, activists, not-for-profit representatives, health researchers, and healthcare providers. 313 photos of visitors' hands were printed off and attached to clotheslines around the booth, with handwritten messages on the photos declaring what is needed to "take the LEAD to get to zero"!
“Getting to zero” relates to the UNAIDS 2010-2015 strategy - getting to zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths.
Neat idea, eh? Better still, YAHAnet took all the photos home and with a bit of techie wizardry, all the photos are online in a virtual exhibit.
You can view that virtual exhibit here.
Some message are in English but there are also many other languages represented, from 68 different countries. A lot of them speak to youth empowerment - “ Empower Young People”, “Listen to Youth”, “It’s Our Turn” are examples. But other participants chose to leave more general, sometimes touching messages – like “Love Conquers All”, “Love, peace, hope, coolness”, “Start dancing, stop AIDS”. You’ll love browsing through this exhibit, believe me.
Almost all the images are also on YAHAnet’s Facebook page . Look at them here.
Big kudos to YAHAnet for doing something engaging, powerful and lasting. In the words of the Who’s’ 1965 song, which predates the organizers by quite a bit, the kids are alright.
About YAHAnet: YAHAnet is an innovative networking platform that provides young people from around the world with the opportunity to actively and creatively participate in the fight against HIV & AIDS using an interdisciplinary approach which combines public health, education, art, and technology. Follow them on Facebook here or twitter @YAHAnet here.
- Tags: activism, AIDS, AIDS 2012, hands exhibit, HIV, IAS 2012, October 2012, PositiveLite_com, youth
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Bob Leahy - Editor
Award-winning blogger Bob Leahy first made his social media mark a decade ago on LiveJournal.com where there are still to this day almost 3,000 entries of his available to be read. He was a featured blogger on Ontario’s HIVStigma.com campaign, along with PositiveLite.com publisher Brian Finch. He joined PositiveLite.Com at its inception in 2009 and became it's Contributing Editor a year later.
Born in the UK, Bob’s background is in corporate banking, which he gladly left in 1994, after being diagnosed with HIV the previous year. He has chaired the board of PARN (Peterborough AIDS Resource Network) and has been an executive board member of both the Ontario HIV Treatment Network (OHTN) and the Canadian AIDS Society (CAS). He was inducted in to the Ontario AIDS Network’s Honour Roll in 2005. Bob is currently a member of Ontario’s GMSH (Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance). He also writes for TheBody.com.
In 2012, Bob was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal for his work and commitment to HIV/AIDS in Canada.
Bob continues to write for this site while in the Positivelite.Com editor’s seat, with a particular interest in HIV prevention, theatre and the arts in general. He is accredited media for a number of Toronto theatres. He lives in Warkworth, Ontario with his partner of thirty years and three dogs.
