Forty years.
Zero of us.

Why we are asking

Forty years is the whole point

The IAS was founded in 1988. AIDS 2028 is its fortieth anniversary.

Forty years is long enough to have learned the lesson. The Denver Principles were written in 1983, five years before the IAS existed. Every year of that organization's life has been lived after poz people already stated the terms: inclusion at every level of decision making. Not consultation. Not a community track. Decision making.

An organization that reaches forty without a single person living with HIV in its management team has not failed to get around to it. It has decided.

Why the IAS

Most demands made of the HIV sector are correct and impossible to action. UNAIDS, the Global Fund and AHF are too large, too diffuse and too insulated to move on the strength of a petition.

The IAS is different. It employs under 100 people. It is small enough that a decision can be made in a single room. And it holds an outsized position in global HIV culture, because it owns the calendar. The International AIDS Conference is the largest opportunity for networking and cross-community dialogue in the global HIV response. Careers, funding relationships and policy directions are set in its hallways.

A small organization with that much influence can change quickly if it chooses to. That is why we are asking the IAS and not somebody else.

The IAS already knows what it is supposed to do

In 1989, Canadian activists interrupted the opening of the V International AIDS Conference in Montreal and read the Montreal Manifesto. Their demand was that people living with HIV be included in the sector and in the conference that carried the name of their disease. The IAS was one year old.

In 1994, forty-two governments signed the Paris Declaration and formally adopted the GIPA principle. It took another decade of unmet promises and sustained community pressure before the conference itself was expanded to include the Global Village and the Youth Force in the early 2000s.

More than twenty years after that, the IAS states a public commitment to GIPA while the composition of its leadership has barely moved. Stating a principle is not implementing one.

What the record shows

No one on the IAS management team is living with HIV.

Four of the twenty-five members of the 2026 to 2028 Governing Council identify as living with HIV. That is 16%.

Permanent executive power sits with a management team that publicly presents as European and racially homogeneous, with no publicly identifiable representation of people living with HIV or of the key populations most affected by the epidemic.

This is not meaningful inclusion. It is institutional hypocrisy: diversity at the margins, straight, white, HIV-negative European control at the centre.

The volunteers are poz. The management is not.

The Youth Force runs on unpaid labour

The Youth Force has been under-resourced by the IAS for decades. Young people are recruited to design, staff and build the largest pavilion in the Global Village, a workload that can exceed 200 hours per person, and are compensated with a scholarship offered as a reward rather than a wage.

A scholarship is access. It is not payment. Treating it as payment lets the IAS extract skilled labour from the population it says it centres, and it filters out anyone who cannot afford to work for free.

Fixed, written, long-term rules for how the Youth Force is resourced and governed would end this. It would also guarantee the regional and serostatus representation the IAS says it wants, instead of leaving it to the goodwill of whoever holds the file that year.

This is bigger than one conference

From the late 2000s onward, the Canadian HIV sector shifted hard from treatment toward prevention. Organizations founded by HIV-positive people are now led and staffed, in some cases entirely, by HIV-negative people. Of Canada's 100-plus HIV/AIDS organizations, only a handful are run by someone living with HIV.

The same shift is happening globally as the sector moves from the evidence-backed TasP model toward an increasingly PrEP-dominant one. We are not against PrEP. We are against a reorganization of the entire response around the model that generates the most opportunity for HIV-negative leadership in research, policy and non-profits, and the least requirement for poz people at the table.

There are HIV-negative allies who reliably centre poz voices, and we work with them. They are not the majority in most organizations, and their ability to uplift poz colleagues is limited by how few poz colleagues there are to uplift.

There is no shortage of us

There was a period when so many poz people in the professional classes were dying so fast that representation at every level was not realistic. That period ended. Treatment works. Access to education and to longer, healthier lives has expanded across the world. There are poz doctors, researchers, scientists, academics, executives and organizers.

They are barely present in the sector built around their own disease. That is not an accident of supply. It is a result of how these institutions choose to hire and who they choose to promote.

We are not asking for a seat. We are asking for half the table, at the one organization small enough to give it, in the year it turns forty.