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| As we, his friends and colleagues, go through the process of trying to summarize the life of a loved one, we become aware that everybody has a say in what his life meant, and what his story entails. We invite you to please send us any information that you feel has been left out, or include it in the guestbook. |
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Rob Ward, HIV Prevention Educator and Activist, passed away in his home late last week after a long fight with AIDS. For the past decade and a half, Rob has lived openly as a gay man with HIV in his personal, professional and advocacy life.
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As an early member of the Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association, Rob’s energy and enthusiasm quickly propelled him from volunteer to Cochair of the annual Gay and Lesbian Cultural Arts Fest, organizing concerts, readings and art displays in Scoville Park to share the creative visions of LGBT artists with the wider Oak Park area community.
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Rob volunteered as an Advisor at Prism Youth Network and served as its Program Coordinator from 1996 to 1999. During this tenure, he founded Spectrum, the suburb’s first LBGT prevention support group for young adults 18-25 years old. Rob started the group responding to the distress of the first cohort of Prism “graduates,” youth who turned 19 years old to find themselves too old for Prism but too young to be admitted to the bars or to appreciate many OPALGA adult events. To this day, Spectrum continues serving young LBGT adults. In fact, it recently spun off another group also under Rob’s guidance, TGIQ, a healthy Saturday night alternative to the bars for LBGT folks of any age. For many of the young people he worked with, Rob was the first and only person they knew to be living openly with HIV. He made a point of periodically “dragging my pharmacy to group” to make sure that each new group of youth fully grasped how much effort and discipline it took to fight HIV each and every day, how much coping with viremia, secondary infections and side effects it involved, how it was not remotely as easy, fun or sexy as the pharmaceutical ads suggested. And yet, by his daily example, he modeled for them how meanfully, productively, responsibly and joyously life with frank AIDS at the brink of poverty could in fact be lived.
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As a Patient Simulator with the Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center, Rob helped to train physicians, nurses, social workers and other health professionals in the art of sensitive and effective HIV test counseling. Dozens of times over, he emotionally relived his own experience of testing positive to provide fledgling test counselors with powerfully realistic roleplays and incisive feedback so that a new generation of testing clients could enjoy more expert, empathic HIV test counseling.
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As an HIV activist, Rob openly represented gay men living with HIV in the western Cook suburbs on the Region 8 HIV Prevention Implementation Group. His insights helped to craft smart regional plans tailored to fight the suburban Cook HIV epidemic with the limited resources at hand.
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Rob is survived by his two sisters, Laura and Lynn; his brothers, Jim, John, Randy and Roger; and many caring friends and colleagues.
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At the end of his marathon run, Rob passes not one, but an armful of torches to us to keep aloft and moving forward. May we carry his work onward inspired by his openness, integrity, ironic humor, generosity, and resolute commitment to fighting the HIV epidemic on every front.
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