Who We Are
Columbia Global Justice (the Student Global AIDS Campaign chapter) at Columbia University, New York, is an organization of students who are dedicated to fighting for the innate rights of all people in the world to health care and medical treatment. The world has recently seen the explosive birth of the most deadly epidemic in history-the AIDS pandemic, with some 43 million people currently affected worldwide. CGJ works to promote awareness of HIV/AIDS and the societal inequities that AIDS, as a biosocial phenomenon, unearths and feeds on, such as structural poverty, racism, gender inequality, and cultural biases against groups stigmatized by sexuality, profession (commercial sex workers), or addiction (injecting drug users). CGJ believes that we MUST act now to stop this already catastrophic disease from destroying countries. We also work to fight other global killers, such as malaria and TB. Because the fight for health care is so entrenched in social and economic inequality, these issues, as well as environmental, civil, and political rights are also important to us.
CGJ was founded in the winter of 2002-2003 with the advent of Jeffrey Sachs to head up the Earth Institute. Since then, we have been an active presence on campus, encouraging inter-school collaboration within the university as well as beyond.