By Caitlin Chandler
This World AIDS Day, rather than pay attention to celebrities who are “dying digital deaths,” or wearing red, do something small or big that can have an actual impact.

Learn about how the upcoming EU free trade agreement with India could prohibit people from accessing HIV treatment, and support people working on ensuring HIV medicines in India remain affordable.

Check out the new campaign from the International Planned Parenthood Federation called Criminalize Hate, Not HIV. Didn’t know that HIV transmission is a crime in some countries, even though criminalization fuels stigma and hate towards people living with HIV? Get informed.

Donate directly to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB & Malaria or to a local HIV organization in your community — because even if governments reduce HIV funding, people can step-in.

Think about how the country you live in could improve its response to HIV. The Uganda government is currently cracking down on the rights of sex workers to organize, the Russian government is denying citizens access to treatment, the Canadian governmenthas no plan for reducing new HIV infections, Obama isn’t fulfilling his campaign commitments on HIV and gets a bit angry when held accountable by young people…and the list goes on. But at the end of the day, political leaders won’t change unless they’re pressured to — so think about becoming politically involved.

There are many other ways to do something meaningful this World AIDS Day — just get out there and move something.

Further Reading

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.