Two Youths Create AIDS Awareness Among Peers

Michelle Chan and Diana Liu love Motion City Soundtrack.

They really love Motion City Soundtrack. They love Motion City Soundtrack so much they’ve listened to everything the band has released. They follow the band on Facebook.

And when, last summer, the band announced that it would accept video submissions from fans competing to win three charity grants from Motion City Soundtrack, Michelle and Diana got to work producing a video about an organization important to both of them: FACE AIDS.

Over the last six months, Michelle and Diana have successful designed, executed and evaluated a multistage, multi-event campaign—YOUth Can Face AIDS—on the Monta Vista campus, in the broader Cupertino community and at Stanford University.

Their campaign consisted of six events, each with the goal of raising awareness about HIV/AIDS among their target primary and secondary demographic groups: kids 13 to 18, and adults 19 to 24.

Their first event, the video, was a hit among fellow DECA members and classmates at school. In fact, the video went on to be recognized as one of four weekly winners on Motion City Soundtrack’s Facebook page, qualifying Michelle and Diana as finalists in the band’s charity competition.

Next, in November, Michelle and Diana hosted a bake sale at the Lucky’s grocery store on Grant Road. Following permission for the event from the manager, the girls roped in support from Monta Vista’s Baking and DECA clubs. They sold everything from Rice Krispy treats to cupcakes (with a red-ribbon frosted on top, of course) and, including donations, made more than $450 to help fund FACE AIDS.

More importantly, they were on point with campaign objectives attracting mainly middle-school and high-school students.

For their third event, Michelle and Diana fell back on one of FACE AIDS’ established fundraising methods. Small pins—red-and-white beads strung together on a safety pin in the image of a red AIDS awareness ribbon—were distributed to friends around campus. The pins, handmade by a Rwandan artisan personally affected by the AIDS academic, are given away for a suggested donation of $5. The proceeds are sent back to the craftspeople who made them.

Though not a huge economic success—Diana said the raised less than $100—the pins got classmates talking.

For two sets of campus events, the girls invited Maggie Savage, an active member of FACE AIDS Stanford, as a guest speaker to speak at Monta Vista. The next week, in partnership with Monta Vista’s leadership class, Michelle and Diana helped to organize the school’s annual AIDS Awareness Week.

Throughout the week, events during lunch hour helped acquaint the student body with the epidemic, its effects and what each student could do to help.

Finally, though unable to host one of their own, Michelle and Diana were heavily involved in FACE AIDS Stanford’s annual dance marathon. The girls participated in the  24-hour event, including themed hours, hourly concerts from local bands and music groups, and food and drinks, by bringing by high-school students to act as the dancers' cheerleaders.

Throughout their campaign, Michelle and Diana drew heavily from their experience as members by framing each event as part of a structured, focused business plan.

The club, what their adviser Carl Schmidt calls only part of Monta Vista’s comprehensive business curriculum, helped to provide the girls with a structured area of study from which to build the campaign.

“Since I firmly believe that the business of America is business, I try to instill in our students that the spirit of enterprise is their heritage,” Schmidt said.

Michelle and Diana framed their awareness campaign as a project for DECA. That way, they could leverage their co-members as marketers, campaign subjects and co-organizers. They also set specific, measurable criteria to determine whether their campaign was a success.

In the fall, they had students take an online quiz to gauge their AIDS knowledge. Then, in April, they had the same students take the quiz again. Their scores had risen more than 20 percent, from 33.4 percent to 55.4 percent, on average.

“It’s much harder to qualitatively measure something; it’s much better to do it quantitatively,” Michelle said.

Now Michelle and Diana are editing their final project report—a 30-page document chronicling everything from their executive summary to their interpretation of their data results.

The experience has been valuable and eye opening for the two high school sophomores.

“I really learned how to communicate with people, how to make sure events function properly,” Diana said. “I think it will help me in real life. In school when I’m doing a project, or in college if I have to coordinate events, or even in the workplace, if I go into management, I’ll know how to make every project successful.”

More importantly, Michelle said she feels she and Diana have created a framework for how other students can start contributing to causes they are passionate about.

“I know some of my friends were surprised that we could launch such a big thing by ourselves. I think a lot of people our age are willing to help some nonprofit cause, but maybe they just don’t know how. I thought the same thing, but I’ve learned that we can do something.”