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Team Auraria walks for AIDS
By Josie Klemaier
jklemaie@mscd.edu

Photo by Molly Kreck • kreck@mscd.edu On Sept. 10 the 19th Annual AIDS Walk Colorado was held in Cheesman Park. This was the first year of the AIDS Run, so participants were encouraged to speed across the finish line. AIDS Walk has become an annual celebration for the victims and surviviors of the syndrome.

Motivation and remembrance were among the key goals of the 19th annual AIDS Walk Colorado.

Approximately 40 volunteers from the Auraria walk team participated in the Sept. 10 event at Cheesman Park in Denver.

Metro sophomore and Auraria walk team member Heather Hankel-Kincaid said she was glad to have an Auraria team to participate with and raised $135 for the cause. She also said there should be more AIDS awareness.

“I don’t think there’s too much support for it because a lot of people are focused on breast cancer,” she said. “People should distribute support throughout all diseases.”

She said it was easy, however, to get family, friends and coworkers to support the fund-raising.

Team member Jordan Bair, a Metro student government representative, said she wants to “lead by example” and raise $1000 for next year’s walk, hoping to encourage others to do the same.

Money raised from the event, projected to be in the hundreds of thousands, will go toward the Colorado AIDS Project and 30 other HIV/AIDS organizations across the state, according to the AIDS Walk Colorado website. Teams still have until the end of September to keep raising money.

In past years, Auraria has been the top fund-raising campus to participate.

Along with the five-kilometer fund-raising walk-a-thon and the inaugural five-kilometer run, the event offered 250 participating groups, free massages and refreshments. Portions of the AIDS Memorial Quilt were also on display.

The quilt included panels that were created by Auraria students, faculty and staff in 1990 in memory of loved ones who were victims of HIV/AIDS. Some patrons held back tears as they mingled through the panels of the quilt on the lawn.

One of the panels was in memory of Ryan White, a boy infected with HIV/AIDS in 1984 through a blood transfusion to treat his hemophilia. He brought a new face to the disease, which much of the American public was ignorant of at the time, when he fought for the right to attend school after he found out he was infected. White died at the age of 13 in April 1990, and the national attention sparked humanitarian efforts and a federal program called the Ryan White CARE Act.

Nancy Aeschlimann, a Metro alumna and case manager for the CCD Center for Personal Disabilities, has attended the event every year since the event started in Denver. She said the event’s attendance jumped into the thousands the year White died.

Billi Mavromatis-Jacobson, a health educator at Metro’s Student Health Center, said she has attended all but one of the 19 AIDS Walk Colorado events and said that attendance is not what it used to be.

In the early years of the event, Mavromatis-Jacobson said that participants filled the entire lawn of Cheeseman Park, unbelievable compared with this year’s attendance, which was relatively sparse on walkers, runners and volunteers.

“You can see how the disease has changed,” she said, noting that the crowd is more dynamic since the beginning of the event and awareness of the disease has spread to a wider variety of people.

The disease has fallen back from the public eye in recent years, lost to attention on other diseases like breast cancer, she said. “It does not get the federal funding that it used to. Do you go down Colfax and see big ads on AIDS anymore?”

However, Aeschlimann said that participation has steadily increased over the last few years. “And it needs to keep growing,” she said. “More woman die from HIV than breast cancer.”