The TOPSY Foundation

It’s usually when I’m doing cool research for work that I come across the most amazing stuff that I always want to share with you guys. I saw this video early last year and to say that it really moved me, is nothing short of an understatement. It made me cry, it made me hopeful and it made me get involved. Now this is the kind of advert that I want to spend the rest of my life making. The kind that moves you to action. I could watch it a million times over.

My friend the designer and I used to be really involved in AIDS research while we were studying at Vega and we always had these dreams about dedicating our lives to those suffering from the disease. And even though dealing with the pain and suffering of it all made our hearts sore, it also made us feel good to be doing something positive - something we thought could be sustainable. I’ll even go as far as to say that the things we saw and experienced not only created an incredible bond between the two of us, but it changed our lives.

Middle Class Life, however, has persuaded us to get average paying 8 - 5 jobs, cook dinners in the evenings and weed the garden on weekends. It makes me sad and more often than not I feel that by being a normal suburban dweller, I am wasting a perfectly good life that could be put to better use elsewhere. It’s really hard though, you know, when you have to pay taxes and bonds and put petrol in your car and survive from day to day – we get caught up in the whole mess of our own lives that we forget about the bigger picture.

I do know and admit that it’s really tough, but flip man we have to try. We can’t cure HIV AIDS, we can't save everyone, and  we can’t even pretend to know enough about it to try. What we can do … is support those people who do, and who are trying to make a difference. We have to start somewhere.

Start with this video, and go from there …