David Busse’s quilt patch sticks out from the rest.  Its gold thread sparkles in the sun amongst old photos of him, playbills, theatre masks and a black feather boa that flutters in the wind.

A former CU theater professor at CU, Busse died of AIDS in 1988.  Following his death, several theater professors sewed a quilt patch in his remembrance.  It was one of more than 40,000 patches made by family members and friends of AIDS victims that is a part of the The NAMES Project Foundation’s AIDS Memorial Quilt.  After traveling to different events around the nation, the patch ended up back on campus last year when CU’s Queer Initiative student group brought part of the quilt to Boulder.  In a chance encounter, two of the professors who made Busse’s patch walked by the quilt project on Norlin Quad and couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw the black feathers peaking up from one of the giant quilts.

“They hadn’t seen the patch since they had made it and they stopped dead in their tracks,” says Blair Iaffaldano a member of the Queer Initiative.  “It’s quilt magic—when the quilt comes great things happen.”

This week, the Queer Initiative hopes to continue the magic as it hosts the AIDS Quilt project again.  This year, there are 25 quilts with 200 patches made by people around the country on display on the Norlin Quad.

With the project, the group hopes to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS as an ongoing problem for the queer and heterosexual community as well as reduce the stigma of AIDS, says Spencer Watson, a Queer Initiative member.  While smaller plastic flags are flying on the quad to educate viewers about the statistics of AIDS deaths by different types of transmission—heterosexual, homosexual, intravenous drug use and other—the quilts are what really humanize the disease, he says.

“It personalizes the issue,” Iaffaldano adds.  “People put their heart and soul into making patches for people.”

Armed with clipboards and pens and flyers, members of the Boulder County AIDS Project as well as student representatives of ONE also set up along the quad.  A grassroots campaign and advocacy organization, ONE works on the issues of extreme poverty and preventable disease, including tuburculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Craig Streit and Matthew McAllister, both members of the CU branch of ONE, were out on the quad asking students to sign a declaration that the organization’s goals should be made a priority on the federal government’s agenda.

The group wasn’t asking for money, but focuses purely about advocacy and using your voice, says McAllister, a ONE campus outreach ambassador.

It is ONE’s first outreach booth on campus since the student group began in 2006 and represented one more step in raising awareness about the issues and providing students a way to get involved, organizers say.

“We have always heard about these issues in abstract,” Streit emphasizes.  “But just because they’re a world away doesn’t mean they’re not worth fighting for.”