Allen Keith James
Revson Fellow 2003-2004
Acting Executive Director
HIV/AIDS Technical Assistance Project
Allen James is Acting Executive Director of the HIV/AIDS Technical Assistance Project, which works with the Department of Education to facilitate HIV-risk-and-prevention education for students of New York’s 300 public high schools. Mr. James is working to transform the organization from its original identity as an agent assisting a huge bureaucracy to a policy analysis and advocacy organization that helps students, teachers, families and communities to understand the gravity of the HIV epidemic’s threat to young people and to devise strategies for appropriate responses to the epidemic. Mr. James was raised in New York City, attended Hampton University on an athletic scholarship, and the University of Colorado as well as CUNY. During a year off from college in 1965, Mr. James was drafted into the military. After returning to New York in 1967 from a two-year military tour of duty with the U.S. Army in Asia, Mr. James went to work in the banking and securities industry. He left the corporate world in 1970 and lived in various cities around the country. While studying literature and theater at the University of Colorado he got his first human services job as a part-time counselor with the National Free Clinic Foundation. In the mid-eighties Mr. James made a transition to full-time work as an advocate for justice and prison reform through the Fortune Society in New York. His association with Fortune lead to an eight-year stay there, where he served as Deputy Executive Director and experimented with innovative service programs that addressed addiction and recovery, long-term unemployment, prison recidivism, and care for persons with AIDS. In the 1990’s Mr. James was Executive Director of Playing To Win (PTW), an advocacy and service organization that strives to make technology and science education available to inner city children. After three years with PTW, Mr. James worked as a planning and management consultant to nonprofit service organizations around the city before coming to the TA Project. At Columbia, Mr. Allen will study race and democracy, education and inequality, and public health policy, especially where it intersects with issues of sexuality and homelessness. His studies will enhance his outreach and community education efforts and his capacities as a writer and public speaker.
(The Revson Fellow’s biography that appears above was last updated in 2003. Revson Fellows may update their biographies on this site by sending email to: revson@columbia.edu)
Revson was a glorious, guiltless, officially sanctioned and supported year of immersion into lectures, good conversation, and the bottomless yield of Columbia’s impressive libraries. It made a gift of that most precious commodity of all: time. Nor could it have been delivered in better company or in more congenial surroundings. We ate together, talked endlessly, traded on our elevated status to bug professors for tutorials, and forged friendships that endure to this day.
