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MTV Staying Alive

nonprofit organization based in London, UK

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 18, 2026
Entity authorityQ6718859 ↗
Source-derived summary

Staying Alive is an MTV international initiative to encourage HIV prevention, promote safer lifestyle choices and fight the stigma and discrimination that fuels the HIV epidemic. Staying Alive is the world's largest HIV mass media awareness and prevention campaign in the world. It produces TV programming in the form of concerts, documentaries, public service announcements, TV film, film competitions, and others. It also has a website with celebrity content talking about safe sex.

Goals and objective

Goals

Staying Alive's aim is to reduce HIV infections among young people globally. It does this by using entertainment to publicize vital safe sex information so that young people are empowered to make safer sexual and lifestyle decisions.

Objectives

• To raise awareness and knowledge about HIV/AIDS and safer sex skills for young people.

• To fight the stigma and discrimination associated with HIV/AIDS.

• To empower young people to take concrete action to protect themselves and others against HIV/AIDS.

• To engage other businesses, media and organizations to form their own response to HIV/AIDS. This includes broadcasting or using Staying Alive material rights at no cost.

History

Staying Alive began in 1998 as a one-off award-winning documentary, with the same name, about six young people from around the world and how their lives were affected by HIV and AIDS and was hosted by George Michael.

In 2002, it expanded into an ongoing global multi-media campaign that provides targeted information about HIV and AIDS using a wide range of interventions that include programming, advocacy, and grant-making.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “MTV Staying Alive” as nonprofit organization based in London, UK. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Staying, Alive and nonprofit.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1998, 2002—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1998. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Staying, Alive and nonprofit providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “MTV Staying Alive”, the useful work is to connect “nonprofit organization based in London, UK” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6718859. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998 and 2002.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “MTV Staying Alive”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow MTV Staying Alive primary sources, MTV Staying Alive archive and Staying research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “MTV Staying Alive”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “MTV Staying Alive” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.