Help Raif & Jared Share HIV Survivor Stories

We're Raif & Jared. We're queer people of color, both living with HIV. And we need your help today to fund the production of our podcast telling the stories of long-term survivors of HIV & AIDS!

We are both in major seasons of change in our own lives. Lost jobs and relationships have left us identifying what really matters in life. For us, it is to create hope and community, especially for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA).

As we walk through this uncertain time, we know there are brighter days ahead. But we also know that we have many days ahead, which was not the case for most PLWHA during the beginning of the epidemic.

Living with HIV today means having the opportunity to experience a long, healthy, and thriving life. We get to have seasons in our lives as a result of the fight so many people had decades ago.

Through our new podcast, Voices Beyond the Virus, we will use audio and video mediums to conduct long-form interviews with long-term and lifetime survivors of HIV/AIDS (LTS).

Each podcast episode will include a conversation with one LTS representing a diversity of experiences. We'll also share brief conversations with current leaders of non profit organizations that have contributed to helping PLWHA.

Building a living archive of stories in Voices Beyond the Virus and distributing the podcast across diverse communications channels will nurture human connection, build community, educate and inspire others on their journey, living with or loving someone with HIV/AIDS.

Since we were both diagnosed in the 2010s, we got to see PrEP and anti retroviral drugs emerge. This paved the way for awareness that Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). U=U means that if someone living with HIV takes their medication as prescribed so that the virus cannot be detected in their body, the virus cannot be transmitted. A massive evolution since the early 80s.

But this advancement in science does not mean that stigma around HIV is gone. Internal stigma can prevent someone from getting tested or seeking any for of treatment or prevention, especially when prevention resources exist. Geographic access, cost, education, and other barriers are also a result of systemic social stigma. Our goal in creating the podcast is to break down these walls to create a space for hope and connection.

But we need your help supporting this GoFundMe to do so!

We've already filmed the pilot episode and are so excited to share it! We sat down with Marc Malkin in his home in Los Angeles. Marc is a distinguished and popular journalist currently the Senior Editor at Variety. He spent more than a decade at E! News and worked at Premiere magazine, the New York Daily News, Us Weekly, and New York magazine. He's received awards from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, GLAAD, and The Advocate. He's the GOAT.

But we wanted to hear about how Marc began his reporting career while he was also coming out as gay and the AIDS crisis was emerging. This meant that he witnessed how his community responded to the epidemic from a journalistic lens during the earliest fight for rights and care. This professional experience paired with losing loved ones to AIDS, including two of his gay uncles, and then his own journey in becoming HIV positive offered a unique view into how the epidemic impacted him.

Because we recorded him in his home, our conversation went really deep, and we captured elements of his experience we could not have if done virtually. For example, Marc showed us a 1995 issue of OUT Magazine he was featured in, which we got to learn about!

To get this same type of vulnerable content from the widest variety of PLWHA, we need to record LTS in their own communities and get funds to achieve this.

Luckily, Raif's years of producing hundreds of YouTube videos for his web series "HIV News" and creating other relevant content means we have most of the necessary equipment to film, edit, and distribute a high-quality video and audio product.

Several national and local nonprofit advocacy organizations - and corporations! - are already eager to partner with us! Some of their current leaders will talk with us about how their organizations have contributed to the movement, and hopefully some of their members who are LTS will be guests on the podcast.

We'll also be creating in-person engagement experiences for their communities. This will look like live panels where we will interview LTS so that the audience gets to hear their experience. And wherever possible, we'll capture these panels on video to add their stories to our virtual library so that people can participate in our community anywhere in the world.

The organizations will help us amplify this content through their networks as well so that we are reaching the most people possible.

We're pitching live panels to nonprofits and their members/staff, schools and other educational settings, corporations, faith organizations, or anywhere else that believes this type of engagement would be useful to their community.

In fact, we will be fiscally sponsored by the National Minority Health Association, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization. The NMHA was founded in 1988 to help bring about health equity and work to close the disparity gap in health and healthcare for underserved, marginalized, hard-to-reach, and minority communities.

This means that donations made on this GoFundMe are fully tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. Money goes directly to the National Minority Health Association, which is the fiscal sponsor for this work.

But we cannot wait for dollars from large institutional parters to come through to start producing more episodes. We need your support now in order to help us confirm these interviews and get episodes filmed, edited, and ready to share publicly!

Please donate to our GoFundMe TODAY and then share the link to your social media followers and pass along to other loved ones via email or text by tapping the "Share" button on your screen in the GoFundMe page.

You've all helped us in some way along our respective journeys. Today, it is more clear than ever that we will need to take powerful individual actions to build community, hope, and connection in an unprecedented way. Creating this podcast - an archive of resilience and hope - is our action to bring hope into the world, not only for people living with HIV/AIDS, or for the uncertain times of today, but also for future generations who will be able to witness how a generation of people impacted by this tragedy fought for their lives, came out the other side, and are still rolling with the ups and downs of a life. One day at a time. No matter what.

Join us today!

Raif Derrazi & Jared Harrison

Creators of Voices Beyond the Virus

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