Jim: Back in about 2000/2001, I was a member of the student organization on campus. At that time it was called the LGBTA: the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Association. The students in the group, the leadership in the group, and some of the members got to talking and were kind of bemoaning the fact that there was no AIDS Walk in Wyoming. There was no such thing. We had a couple of new members who had moved in from back east. They'd been in Seattle and had been very involved with some of the AIDS Walk efforts there and HIV prevention and response work in that area, and they were just kind of stunned that none of that was going on here—that there was no such thing as an AIDS walk, that there wasn't any kind of fundraiser raising support for research and development or more importantly for people living in the state with HIV and AIDS. 

They decided, well, okay, then let's start one. We're a student organization, we're part of the university, we can do this. There's walks going on all the time here in town. And so we put together a committee, and started reaching out to some of the other groups in Wyoming. We connected with the State Health Department, with a couple of the local clinics, and things like that. And before I knew it, we had kind of built the plans for the first ever Wyoming AIDS Walk. We were having pretty regular meetings on campus. We had folks who would drive over from Cheyenne for the meetings. We had a good group from both on campus and in the community who were helping out with everything. 

We did our first ever Wyoming AIDS Walk in 2001. It was really a big success. We didn't raise tens of upon tens of thousands of dollars, but we did a fair amount. And the real focus around it was raising money for people living in the state of Wyoming with HIV or AIDS. We worked with the one and only nonprofit in the state that was HIV focused: The Wyoming AIDS Project. We raised the money and then gave the money to them to distribute. They already had a process in place for distributing money to people, supplemental funds and things. 

So we became the only fundraiser in the state of Wyoming that was focused on HIV and AIDS. And one of the things that I remember is just the camaraderie and the laughter and the energy and enthusiasm of the folks who were organizing it. It was a lot of work, and most of us had never done something on this scale. We were trying to create something that would draw people from around the state, and we did. You know, we had some folks who were raising—that first year, I think the top walker raised $1100 by themselves, which, in 2001, in the state of Wyoming for the first ever Wyoming AIDS walk, that was pretty amazing. That felt monumental. We had put together prizes and t-shirts, and we had to build the walk forms, and build a website and all of the things that were, you know, just to get it up and running and off the ground. 

It was very helpful that it was a student organization because we got to use a lot of the university resources to kind of get that up and off the ground. We had access to meeting room space. The student org could just reserve a meeting room anytime we needed and at no cost. So it was really helpful to have some of those resources, and some of the benefits of being student led and student driven. It was also very important to us that it be grassroots and community driven because this was about people living in the state of Wyoming.

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.