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desirae

desirae
Desirae


Title and Organization:		college student, Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS
Gender and Age:		Female, 21
Location:		Greenville, South Carolina
Country of Residence:		United States
Languages:		English , Spanish



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About Me

Desirae, 20, studies political science at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina and served as GYCA 2007 National Focal Point for the United States. She first became actively involved in HIV/AIDS activism in high school as a Global Citizen Corps leader for NetAid and reached over 3,000 of her peers through a year-long awareness and advocacy project on issues surrounding global poverty. During high school she also organized fundraisers for schoolhouses in Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Zambia and was chosen to represent the U.S. at the Global Campaign for Education in Washington, D.C, where she now volunteers as staff to help train high school students to lobby for universal access to education. Dez gave a presentation with the VP of the National Peace Corps Association at an International Social Studies Association conference on "Service Learning and Global Citizenship”.

As a university student, she founded Furman Global Justice, a small scale special interest group that brings campus progressives together to develop stronger grassroots campaigns and to lobby for change on issues such as debt cancellation, trade reform and HIV/AIDS. She has been active in HIV/AIDS advocacy through her work with GYCA, Student Global AIDS Campaign, and the South Carolina C2EA. She aided in a project that ended the 500 person wait list under South Carolina's AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP). Dez participated in the Oxfam CHANGE Initiative, helped organize a national student lobby day for the farm bill, and serves as the Missions Student Pastor for Wesley Fellowship, the Vice President of the Environmental Group, and the News Editor for The Paladin, Furman's weekly newspaper. She has led a project that focuses on civilians injured in Iraq and, as a result of these efforts, has been chosen to join a women’s peace delegation to Iran this June.