The Recollectors Memorial
Tax deductible
Where are the children of people who died of AIDS? There must be hundreds of thousands of them...I fear that the descendants of people who died of AIDS do not fully understand that their parents perished because of governmental and societal neglect...Where is our catharsis, our healing? -- Sarah Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind
The narrative around HIV/AIDS led our culture to believe that it mostly impacted gay men without children. But this has never been true: AIDS has never been confined to the gay male community, and many of the men and women who died of AIDS were survived by children.
In 2015, Alysia Abbott and Whitney Joiner, both of whom lost their fathers to AIDS in 1992, launched The Recollectors Project, a community and storytelling site to find others with our same story. We now have a flourishing community of over 200 Recollectors. We tell their untold stories on Facebook and Instagram, on our storytelling site TheRecollectors.com. We meet up in real life when we can, and our community has become essential to healing and processing our shared loss.
Our community thrives online, but there is no public and permanent memorial for the parents who were lost to AIDS. There's no place for collective remembrance, mourning, grief and processing.
We'd like to change that.
The National AIDS Memorial Grove, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, contains hundreds of names of people lost to AIDS, as etchings in their "Circle of Friends," and on etched boulders placed throughout the Memorial. We'd like to dedicate one of the memorial boulders in the Grove to parents who died of AIDS.
The cost of this dedication and engraving is $10,000. We've seeded this campaign with $1,500 of our own funds, and have already raised another $1,500 this week. We're looking for the remaining $7,000 by January 1, 2019, with the hope that a boulder etched with "In Memory of the Parents We Lost to AIDS" will be unveiled at next year's World AIDS Day ceremony.
We'd love your help reach this goal. Your contribution will make an impact, whether you donate $5 or $500. Every little bit helps.
The narrative around HIV/AIDS led our culture to believe that it mostly impacted gay men without children. But this has never been true: AIDS has never been confined to the gay male community, and many of the men and women who died of AIDS were survived by children.
In 2015, Alysia Abbott and Whitney Joiner, both of whom lost their fathers to AIDS in 1992, launched The Recollectors Project, a community and storytelling site to find others with our same story. We now have a flourishing community of over 200 Recollectors. We tell their untold stories on Facebook and Instagram, on our storytelling site TheRecollectors.com. We meet up in real life when we can, and our community has become essential to healing and processing our shared loss.
Our community thrives online, but there is no public and permanent memorial for the parents who were lost to AIDS. There's no place for collective remembrance, mourning, grief and processing.
We'd like to change that.
The National AIDS Memorial Grove, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, contains hundreds of names of people lost to AIDS, as etchings in their "Circle of Friends," and on etched boulders placed throughout the Memorial. We'd like to dedicate one of the memorial boulders in the Grove to parents who died of AIDS.
The cost of this dedication and engraving is $10,000. We've seeded this campaign with $1,500 of our own funds, and have already raised another $1,500 this week. We're looking for the remaining $7,000 by January 1, 2019, with the hope that a boulder etched with "In Memory of the Parents We Lost to AIDS" will be unveiled at next year's World AIDS Day ceremony.
We'd love your help reach this goal. Your contribution will make an impact, whether you donate $5 or $500. Every little bit helps.
Co-organizers (2)
Alysia Abbott
Organizer
San Francisco, CA
Tides Center
Beneficiary
Whitney Joiner
Co-organizer