Making an AIDS Free Generation a Reality

Guest blog by Howard Schultz, Starbucks Chairman & CEO

The global fight against AIDS is at an exciting yet critical juncture. For the first time, we can see the possibility of what the global health community is calling “the beginning of the end of AIDS.”

We’ve reached this point through an extraordinary public-private collaboration involving a wide range of partners: governments like the United States, through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), have made remarkable commitments of money and other resources. Major private foundations, such as the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Health Access Initiative, have also contributed significant amounts of funding and game-changing ideas about how to spend this money in the most impactful ways. Organizations like The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are disbursing the funds to provide preventive education, treatment and related services to keep people alive. And the United Nations, through UNAIDS, has played a critical role in coordinating and overseeing all these efforts.

A key driver in getting the private sector engaged is (RED), which was founded five years ago to drive corporate support and help educate the public on the war on AIDS, giving people a call to action to participate.  It continues to be an incredibly successful model, generating over $180 million to support the Global Fund’s work. All the money goes to programs on the ground in sub-Saharan Africa. The results speak for themselves – more than 7.5 million people have been impacted by Global Fund initiatives that (RED) supports.

Today, HIV/AIDS is not necessarily a death sentence. It is a chronic disease that can be managed, when people are given the information and, most importantly, the life-saving medications they need to live healthier lives.  Thanks in part to the collaborative work of various organizations, those medications now cost a small fraction of what they did just a decade ago.

Starbucks has been a proud (RED) partner since 2008 and in that time has contributed nearly $10 million to the Global Fund to help those living with HIV/AIDS in Africa.  For us, it has been both a rewarding and effective business relationship that reaffirms our collective commitment to caring about the cause and doing something tangible to bring about real change.

Now we are joining with (RED) to focus on a very specific goal: virtually ending mother-to-child transmission of HIV by the end of 2015. No child should be born with this horrific burden.  We hope to create a generation of kids – the first generation in thirty years – born HIV-free. We will continue to work with (RED) because, for our brand, it allows us to combine good works and good business. The global economic woes that have hit everyone so hard should not diminish our commitment to finishing the job we started.  It will take a renewed focus, and some creativity, to get it done.  But we cannot cede the ground we have gained when an opportunity this great is staring us in the face. We want to help make an AIDS Free Generation a reality.

Howard Schultz, Starbucks Chairman & CEO

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