The Ripple Effect

Changemakers: Jacob Tobia, Hasan Khosravi, Trevor Dougherty, Jasper Passion, Qaisar Roonjha, Gaurav Nakhare, Aldiyar Abduali

Founded by a group of young activists, the Ripple Effect is an organization based on the simple premise that our collective creativity and initiative is the first step to preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS. We hope that our grassroots campaign, which begins with an online pledge, ripples across communities, borders, and generations. Through the Ripple Effect Pledge, our vision is to prevent the spread of HIV by empowering youth and community leaders to become peer educators within their communities.

Our concept is very simple: to spread HIV awareness by pledging to promote activism among others (resembling the Pay It Forward system). If one person tells 5 other people about HIV prevention, and those 5 people tell 5 others then we can end what started as a ripple, with a ripple. Each person can take the pledge, the way he/she wants (whether it’s through sponsoring an HIV Orphan or through changing his/her facebook status for a week). For this year, we have many exciting events planned to help raise awareness and inspire others to take the pledge. Some events include a flash mob, a date auction, a basketball tournament, free HIV testing for students, and many more.

In fact, one of our novel projects this year includes joining Dan Cullum’s “I am” Challenge which consists of wearing different versions of one t-shirt design for the span of one year. These t-shirt will help raise funds and awareness for orphans raised in HIV-affected communities while uniting a group of students against the pervasive materialism among college students and adolescents. We hope by instilling this culture of activism, we can create a Ripple Effect, the name of our organization; currently, we’re based in Georgia Tech, Duke University, Pakistan, Philippines, Kazakhstan, University of North Carolina, and Brown University.