Phill Wilson

Phill Wilson is the founder of the Black AIDS Institute. He has served on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) and sits on the Strategic Working Group for National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Phill Wilson (born April 22, 1956) founded the Black AIDS Institute in 1999 and served as its CEO and is a prominent African-American HIV/AIDS activist. Career Phill Wilson's career in activism started after he and his partner, Chris Brownlie, were both diagnosed with HIV in the early 1980s. This was at a time when the AIDS epidemic was just starting in the United States, and Wilson has said he did not feel like anyone was bringing together the black community to solve the problem. The country believed that AIDS was a gay disease, and outreach was primarily focused in white, gay communities, when Wilson believed that AIDS affected the black community much more. When his partner died of an HIV-related illness in 1989, Wilson channeled his grief into acti