Partnerships With Meaning and Purpose

Partnerships With Meaning and Purpose
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 Quest Diagnostics employees joined more than 100 community volunteers at the National AIDS Memorial during the last Community Volunteer Workday of 2017 to announce a $100,000 grant to bolster the memorial’s volunteer workday program in 2018. The grant from Quest Diagnostics will support the memorial’s Community Volunteer Workday program in 2018 and help fund new equipment, plants, trees and shrubberies and support maintenance and hardscape improvements. (Photo credit: Marvin Morris)

Quest Diagnostics employees joined more than 100 community volunteers at the National AIDS Memorial during the last Community Volunteer Workday of 2017 to announce a $100,000 grant to bolster the memorial’s volunteer workday program in 2018. The grant from Quest Diagnostics will support the memorial’s Community Volunteer Workday program in 2018 and help fund new equipment, plants, trees and shrubberies and support maintenance and hardscape improvements. (Photo credit: Marvin Morris)

For more than a quarter century, the National AIDS Memorial has served as a space to remember those lost to AIDS and ensure their stories are remembered by future generations.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic a handful of friends came together, seeking a place to express their collective grief. Their tireless work created what today is a national memorial, but their spirit and commitment laid the foundation for a core part of what we do as an organization through our community volunteer workdays.

Each month, volunteers of all ages join us to give their time and hearts to help keep the landscape of our beloved 10-acre living memorial a beautiful and solemn place.

We use the time together as a community to not only remember and honor, but to celebrate important milestones for the memorial and in the fight for social justice. This year, we marked several.

In June, our volunteers welcomed San Francisco’s Congresswoman, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, for a workday to commemorate her 30 years in Congress and her longtime commitment to the memorial and advocacy for the LGBT community.

Hundreds of hemophilia supporters and survivors came together in September for a special workday with our volunteers, where we dedicated the Hemophilia Memorial Circle, a beautifully designed permanent feature built to forever honor all the lives lost in the hemophilia community to AIDS.

We also marked an important milestone in our volunteer program. Over 40,000 volunteers have now donated more than 200,000 volunteer hours and helped plant more than 10,000 trees, plants and shrubs at the memorial.

During our final workday of the year, Quest Diagnostics, a long-time supporter of the memorial, announced a $100,000 grant, one of the largest we’ve ever received, to help bolster our community volunteer workday program in 2018.

The grant will help fund new equipment, plants, trees and shrubberies and support maintenance and hardscape improvements at the memorial. The grant aligns with Quests’ mission as a leading provider of diagnostics information services, and its dedication to advancing disease management for the HIV community and raising the standards of care in HIV diagnostics and beyond.

Their generosity, along with the support of our many volunteers and partners, helps us continue to not just carry out our mission, but to expand our programs, as we have done now for over 25 years.

The story of HIV and AIDS is a story of both darkness and light: Darkness in the worst days of the epidemic and the confusion and despair across the country; light in the efforts of many communities coming together and finding common cause.

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