World AIDS Day 2024
For World AIDS Day 2024, we organized a guided walk around Leicester City centre to visit sites connected with the history of community responses to HIV in the city.
More about the project
World AIDS Day takes place on 1 December every year. Trade always organizes a Red Ribbon Remembrance event on or around World AIDS Day each year. This is an opportunity for our communities to come together, to remember those we have lost to HIV related diseases, and to recommit our efforts to ending new HIV transmissions.
On the walk, we visited two locations where the Leicester Lesbian and Gay Centre (now Leicestershire LGBTQ+ Centre) were based and where several key HIV organisations were formed (including Trade). We also visited the former offices of Leicestershire AIDS Support Service, Black Mesmac, and the Black HIV/AIDS Forum who provided crucial HIV prevention advice and care for people living with HIV in the 1980s and ‘90s. We finished the walk in Town Hall Square lighting candles in the shape of a red ribbon, the symbol of World AIDS Day.
Our Red Ribbon Remembrance walk gave older community members a chance to remember friends and loved ones they had lost to HIV and gave younger friends a stronger sense of our community’s history in taking care of each other.
