Phill Wilson is the face and the force behind the Black AIDS Institute, a non-profit which does mobilization and advocacy around HIV and AIDS in the black community. His innovative think tank for the last three years has published a profound report, "AIDS in Black America" which gets to the heart of the matter and offers sometimes out-of-the-box solutions.

Wilson came by the AOL Black Voices offices to talk with '25 Years and Counting' about what the Institute plans this year and his ambitious goals for black organizations, presidential candidates and the community itself to end the AIDS epidemic in the black America by 2012. Part one of two.

What are the Black AIDS Institute's goals this year?

The goal is to have every major black institution create a five-year strategic action plan that says what are they going to do? We're setting the goal that we're going to end the AIDS epidemic in black America by 2012. We're talking about seven sectors: faith and churches, civil rights institutions, social and fraternal, academic institutions -- primarily HBCUs, media, both wholly owned black institutions and media like black Voices, entertainment, celebrities and corporations. Our model is "our people, our problem, our solution."

The AIDS epidemic is not going to end for us until we decide to make it end. Period.So the NAACP and the Urban League and Rainbow PUSH and SCLC and all those folks should be setting annual testing goals, they should be making commitments to educate their constituents and their staffs, they should be including HIV and AIDS in their advocacy agenda. There are 20,000 people running for president next year (laughs) -- every one of those folks should have an AIDS platform agenda.

Have you done any outreach to Obama Barack and/or Hillary Clinton?

We've started that process. I've had a meeting with Obama. He's asked us to write an AIDS platform for him. We've sent letters out to every presidential candidate on both sides of the aisles. "What is your AIDS plan?" Here's our recommendation for an AIDS plan. Obama is the only one out of the only candidates -- Democrat or Republican -- that even mentions AIDS on his Web site. And that's a direct frontal attack on black America. Because four years ago, everybody [had a plan].Forget race. In the U.S. there's no national plan to end AIDS epidemic and yet when we give money in the developing world -- sub-Saharan Africa, India or Eastern Europe, we demand that they have a national plan.

What are you saying to black institutions around these plans?

The message that we're delivering to black institutions is that while AIDS is clearly a health issue, it's not just a health issue. It's a civil rights issue, it's a urban renewal issue, it's an education issue. It's all of these issues. And in a blunt and crude way, dead folks don't need a college education, dead folks ain't buying magazines or newspapers, and dead folks don't need civil rights. And so, if we can't deal with these kinds of manifest health issues, particularly when you're talking about a thoroughly preventable transmissible disease that strikes people in the heart of their most productive years in life and is growing in our community... clearly it's an issue we need to address.

How are you going to follow up to make sure that these organizations follow through?

We're going to say, NAACP said that in 2007 they were going to do X and the Urban League said in 2007 they were going to do Y. Every year we're going to come out with a report card, did they do what they said they were going to do? Then we're going to measure against the increase in engagement. In 2004, the NAACP's engagement was X, in 2005, it was X-plus, in 2006 it was X-plus-plus to see how those commitments grow over time. And then thirdly, we're going to measure against Public Health outcomes. So that you say that we're saying we want to end the epidemic by a specific date -- first of all no one has been bold enough or courageous enough to set a date -- so we're saying we're going to end the epidemic by 2012.

What about the Bill and Melinda foundation, the CDC, and the Clinton Foundation?

The CDC first of all has just launched the heightened-response to HIV in black communities but they really have no courage. They're not willing to go beyond what they know they can accomplish. Forget what's needed. So they're setting goals like we want to reduce HIV rates five percent over the next three years. To me that's not how you beat an epidemic, quite frankly, in my opinion, that's how you give up. We're going to continue to let people die because five percent is not an aggressive enough goal. I don't know if we can end the epidemic by 2012, but given the devastation that's happening, anything less of a goal would be immoral. Now, in defense of the CDC as an agency, there's not been an increase in funding in five years. Now, so, they're really dealing with fewer and fewer dollars so they have less and less to work with, which impacts their ability to manifest change.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, their investment in the United States is solely on education. They do no AIDS in the United States. All of their AIDS is global.

We've just recently approached the Clinton Foundation asking them two things. One is, they've been going around the world developing these AIDS plans for other countries, so we've been asking them, what if black America was an independent nation? And this independent nation called Black America has an AIDS problem -- which it does -- and they wanted to solve that AIDS problem. What would that plan look like? How would you fight this epidemic among this independent nation? And so, we're going to the Clinton folks who develop these national plans and saying let's develop one of these plans for black America.

The second thing that we're asking the Clinton Foundation to do is that every year in the fall he does this Clinton Global Initiative where he invites the richest people on the planet, he gives them four or five proposals and he says to them, I want you to fund these four or five proposals. We've asked him to make this mobilization one of the ideas that he floats to these folks.

What's your take of the FDA banning gay men from giving blood?

It's mostly a sign of the times. So much of these administrative policies are not only NOT driven by science, but are anti-science, and that's part of the tragedy of it. The FDA is making these decisions that are not science based. And there's no science to that kind of blanket statement. What it does is fuel the misconceptions that fuel the myths that then undermine our ability to address HIV and AIDS. When we stick to the science, however it falls, you're on solid footing.

Because the point is, it really is not whether or not you've ever had sex with a woman or a man, the point at the end of the day is has this person been exposed to HIV? You put a blanket restriction on gay men, but you don't put a blanket restriction on people who have had unprotected sex. Or, if you follow the logic train, then if you are a woman who has had sex with a man who has had sex with a man -- you should be banned [also].