movies opensource_movies Cass Mann, an HIV-positive gay man and the founder of UK’s only gay men’s HIV/AIDS charity Positively Healthy (http://www.posh-uk.org.uk/), talks about the mission and history of his not-for-profit charity Positively Healthy. Positively Healthy was formed as the result of the death of one of Cass Mann's closest friends, David Reichenberg, one of the world’s leading baroque oboe players who played in the ‘English Concert’. After he died, Cass went into shock and decided he didn't want to see anyone else die like that. Cass got linked up with Simon Martin, who had founded ‘The Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine’, and an HIV positive nurse named Dietmar Bolle who worked in London’s first AIDS ward. Over lunch, they came up with the name Positively Healthy and decided to prevent all the deaths from AIDS that they could. Dietmar later died of AIDS but confessed that he really died of loneliness. The first group of trustees was mainly composed of medical doctors and nurses. Cass taught the English and Welsh Nursing Board AIDS awareness courses for several years. The ethos from the beginning was that Positively Healthy would pay no salaries, own no premises and would be 100% run and directed by its service users. That approach has never changed. The charity is 100% run by its beneficiaries. For more information about HIV/AIDS, visit http://www.posh-uk.org.uk/ and http://www.AIDSvideos.org/. HIV;AIDS;Positively;Healthy;mission;prevention;death AIDSvideos.org http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ TheMissionAndHistoryOfPositivelyHealthyAnHivNot-for-profitCharity ericweb@stopbadtherapy.com 2008-11-11 00:19:09 2008-11-11 00:26:29