Dear AREA friends and supporters - we are coming into the home stretch in the week before this year’s AIDS Walk New York.
AREA has participated in GMHC’s Community Partnership Program for the Walk ever since it was adopted well over 20 years ago. Please consider joining AREA’s team for this year’s Walk or make a donation to my personal page on the AIDS Walk website.
You can do either one simply by clicking on AREA’s team URL or the one taking you to my personal page;
This is the TEAM link: gmhc.aidswalkny.org/AREA
This is the link to my personal page: gmhc.aidswalkny.org/Brent
My apologies for the last minute outreach.
I’ve been struggling with some formidable health challenges as a result of my congestive heart failure.
This is the time of year when we do our major fundraising appeal for both AREA and GMHC.
Thank you for all the support over the years.
I hope I can continue to rely on your generosity. With FOR THE LOVE OF FRIENDS being offered over World PBS starting on June 2nd this is a very crucial time for AREA.
Please contact your local PBS Networks to find out if and when they will be airing the AREA film.
I sure hope you will have a chance to see it. I think the filmmakers did a spectacular job!
Blessings and thanks.
Brent
FOR THE LOVE OF FRIENDS
FOR THE LOVE OF FRIENDS, a documentary film about the original Run and AREA’s work to end AIDS, will debut on American Public Television in June 2023 to coincide with Pride Month.
Reach out to your local public television stations to make sure they are scheduling it in their programming. You can follow the film on social media @ftloveoffriends or on the filmmakers’ website.
Welcome to AREA's Website
On October 13th, 1984 – Brent Nicholson Earle, AREA’s Founder and President, experienced a confluence of life changing events that led him to undertake a more than 9000 – mile Run around the perimeter of the United States. In order to support this undertaking , Earle and some dedicated friends had to create their own not-for-profit AIDS organization. They established a Board of Directors, recruited a core team of reliable volunteers and started raising funds.
Only a recreational runner, Earle began an intensive training program and, by the end of 1985, he had run five marathons and more than 3500 training miles to prepare for his unprecedented odyssey around America to raise awareness about AIDS and funds to help end the crisis.
He was accompanied on the entire Run by his 70-year-old mother, Marion Nicholson, who drove her old Buick Regal behind her son as pace car. They started out from New York City on March 1, 1986.
The role of Road Manager was filled by a few stalwart volunteers, predominantly Terrah Keener who was Road Manager from the 2nd to the 6th month. When a suitable replacement for Terrah could not be found, AREA’s Executive Director, Bill Konkoy, packed up his files and electric typewriter and joined the Run in Missoula, Montana in August of 1986 for what was presumed to be a temporary period of time. Bill ended up finishing the final 14 months with Brent and Marion. Assuming the duties of Road Manager, Bill continued to administrate this unprecedented event from payphones in campgrounds all around America. Back in New York, the Officers of AREA’s Board - Anita Ross, Charles and Jackie Leighton and Cathy Lee Crane - anchored the Run’s transcontinental activities.
This entire 20-month inaugural event was financed without any grants or a single cent of corporate sponsorship. As head of fundraising, AREA Vice-President, Charles Leighton, daily sent three teams of tablers from his and his wife’s apartment in Manhattan Plaza to New York street corners where they sold AREA tee-shirts and buttons and collected donations.
On October 31, 1987, when the Run finally returned to New York, Leighton produced a spectacular Homecoming that included a pledge run for the People With AIDS Coalition from the George Washington Bridge, to a rally in Union Square hosted by Joseph Papp and Raquel Welch and attended by more than 4,000 people. As a way of illustrating his closing remark, “My Run may be finished but the race against AIDS is far from over,” Nicholson Earle ran the New York Marathon the next day!
For almost four decades, AREA has continued to produce ambitious events to help maintain a high level of awareness about AIDS in America and around the world. We welcome everyone to join our campaign.
Let no one be discouraged by the belief that there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills - against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Few of us will have the greatness to bend history itself. But each of us can work to change a small portion of events and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless, diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man or a woman stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”