KEEP A CHILD ALIVE BLACK BALL TONIGHT

250,000 peopleserved so far.
Keep a Child Alive provides with your help, first class AIDS care and support, care for orphans, food with a healthy dose of love and respect to the Mothers, Fathers, Brothers, Sisters, Aunts, Uncles, Sons, Daughters, Husbands, Wives, Friends, Neighbors, and Lovers affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India.


The event takes place tonight. Check back later for images of the fashions and special performances from Alicia keys, Sade and more.

To Alicia Keys, celebrities have become commodities that can be tapped for good.

To that end, the Brooklyn native will Thursday announce a new campaign to raise more than $1 million for her AIDS charity, Keep a Child Alive, at its annual Black Ball New York charity event.

Deemed "Buy Life," the organization will recruit celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Katie Holmes, Justin Timberlake and Kanye West, as well as Ms. Keys and her new husband, producer Swizz Beatz, to model for an advertising campaign placed in magazines, bus stops and on the Internet.

Each celebrity will be photographed wearing a T-shirt that says "Buy Life" with an imprinted bar code. Using scanable technology, smart- phone users will then be able to scan the bar code from the ads and automatically donate to the charity.

drawn by Noli Novak

ALICIA KEYS

"The whole idea is that if you're spending $100 on a pair of shoes or everything else we spend money on that we don't really need, why not use the money to save a life instead?" Ms Keys says. "We can completely redefine the ultimate symbol of consumerism. Life is precious, we want to fashion it as the must-have purchase of the season, the one item that no one can be without."

Ms. Keys, who is 29 years old, launched Keep a Child Alive seven years ago with agent and activist Leigh Blake. Since then, the pair has raised $20 million toward funding anti-retroviral drugs and other treatments, clinics and orphan care in South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and most recently, in India.

Nationwide, however, AIDS organizations have reported a sharp decrease in federal aid and donations. For instance, the New York Community Trust, the largest private funder of New York City nonprofits, saw private funding it receives for AIDS-related causes drop to $1.7 million in 2008 from $2.3 million in 2003.

"People talk about a fatigue and want to know why there is no movement in this pandemic," Ms. Keys says. "But we see positive results every day so we just have to show people how we change lives, stress the work people do and to help people feel a part of something real and important."

One of the ways Ms. Keys says this is possible is to continue to find innovative ways to engage donors. The group was one of the first nonprofits to utilize text-messaging for fund-raising, launching its "Text ALIVE" campaign in conjunction with Ms. Keys's "As I Am" concert tour in 2008. Through texting, she raised more than $800,000.