She stood up and told him she was leaving South Africa -- and him.
Marketing Life
Country singer Wynonna Judd was reveling in a rare day off in Beverly Hills last February when she got an unwelcome phone call from Roberts.
Kate Roberts, who once promoted soft drinks and cigarettes to youth, has enlisted pop stars to promote safe sex.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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Roberts wanted to talk about a nonprofit organization she had created called YouthAIDS, to encourage abstinence, delayed first sexual experience, and condom use among young people. Judd's sister, actress Ashley, had already agreed to be a "youth ambassador" for the organization, and all three women had been together at a New York fundraising ball for YouthAIDS in October 2003. Roberts had gone in a loaned Armani dress and Wynonna Judd had stereotyped her as "another alpha female in a ball gown."
Roberts arrived at the hotel that February day and talked for the next four hours "with a missionary zeal" about the tragedy of AIDS and how everybody has a responsibility to help try to stop it. Judd says she laughed, and she listened and she cried, and, in the end: "She blew the doors wide open to my soul. . . . I'd kick anybody's you-know-what with one hand tied behind my back for her."
Roberts was approaching the fight against AIDS by doing what she knew best: selling something by making it trendy.
Her goal is to stop the spread of the disease by changing the behavior of the people most likely to get infected: 15-to-24-year-olds. In today's celebrity-driven world, that requires the use of big names to tell young men to put on a condom, to tell young women to insist on it.
"It's a sad state of affairs when you have to make it [condom use] sexy, bring in Hollywood, but you do," she says.
With Holscher's help, she sold her idea to officials at the Washington-based Population Services International, which provided her money to start YouthAIDS. She moved to Washington in 1999, with a strategy of developing HIV/AIDS funding and awareness as a business, not as a charity seeking a handout.
"We don't just beg for money," she says. "We develop campaigns that are a win-win for both the cause and for the company" that donates money.
She doesn't meet anyone new without talking about her cause, usually in a mini-sermon that comes in one long breath:
"YouthAIDS is a platform for everyone to make a difference. That means individuals, churches, schools, students, corporations, governments, NGOs, rock stars, celebrities and the media. For just $10, the cost of a pizza, you can educate and protect a young person from HIV/AIDS for a year. The problem is ignorance.
"In my experience in the West, no one cares because they think it's a disease for the developing world. The reality is it is on our doorstep and every hour two young people become infected in the U.S. You can essentially save a life and perhaps prevent one of the sex workers in Pattaya [Thailand] from going into the sex trade and allow them to follow their dreams, get an education and become a doctor, experience the joy of love and marriage.
"AIDS is literally the worst pandemic of all time, a sexual holocaust, a threat to all mankind and you die alone. It's not a cause, but an emergency."
She has turned YouthAIDS into a global effort, using theater performances, media, concerts, fashion and sports to reach millions of people. Justin Timberlake, Eve, Destiny's Child and other artists have recorded public service announcements for the group.
She returned to Cape Town, in 2002, this time with musicians P. Diddy and Alicia Keys, doing a global concert with MTV to raise funds for AIDS prevention.
"We took Alicia and Puffy around the townships and had them go to AIDS hospitals and clinics," Roberts says. "When we walked into one of the maternity wards of a hospital for pregnant HIV mothers, they all started singing Alicia's song 'Falling.' It was a big moment, as I know we had changed lives."
"I love her philosophy of using the language of the youth . . . the syntax that is indigenous and popular to one specific area," says Ashley Judd, who in July traveled with Roberts to Southeast Asia for the International AIDS conference. "So you get a star in Nigeria that nobody has ever heard of anywhere else talking to Nigerians about abstinence, birth control and condoms. "
Roberts worked not only on celebrities (Macy Gray and Bono, among them) but also persuaded foundations to ante up, including Melinda and Bill Gates's, which views her "innovative" approach as "very effective in helping young people protect themselves from HIV," says Helene Gayle, who directs the foundation's HIV, TB and reproductive health program.
