David Fair
David Fair (born April 27, 1952) is an American activist who has been a leader in the labor, LGBT, AIDS, homeless and child advocacy movements in Philadelphia, PA since the 1970s.
Also in 1971, he led an effort to organize Penn students to vote against then-Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo in the Philadelphia mayoral race,[12] which was unsuccessful.
[13] Fair attended Stockholm University in 1974–75 at its Institute for English-Speaking Students in a Penn junior year abroad program.
In 1980–82, he and Wilds formed Gay Campaign 80 and the Philadelphia Equal Rights Coalition, successful efforts to elect LGBT people to various neighborhood party posts in the city.
The organizing efforts garnered the attention of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which published an article on the growing influence of LGBT political activism in the city featuring Wilds and Fair.
The Union, which itself had a large black LGBT membership, also became the base of Gay and Lesbian Friends of Wilson Goode, chaired by Fair.
In that speech, Fair decried the dominance of racist attitudes in the local white gay community, using as a prime example the closing of the only LGBT mental health agency in the city once it began to serve a predominately people of color clientele.
[26] In 1986, Fair authored AIDS and Minorities in Philadelphia: A Crisis Ignored for BEBASHI and began participating in the organizing of African American and Latino LGBT people to combat the epidemic in their own communities.
[29] The controversies surrounding the organizing by Fair and other activists, both black and white, among Philadelphia communities of color are detailed in To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle Against HIV/AIDS a book by Dan Royles at the University of North Carolina.
In November, 1987, Philadelphia Mayor Goode asked Fair to revitalize the city's lagging HIV/AIDS programs by leading the formation of the AIDS Activities Coordinating Office.
[35] As a result of a lawsuit filed against the Philadelphia Police Department, Fair received a settlement of $3,000 which he used to purchase the first computer for We The People.
In 1994, Fair led a 17-day hunger strike[36] with nine others to demand that the state of Pennsylvania maintain funding for the only nursing facility for people with AIDS, Betak, a successful campaign that kept the home open for several more years.
[41] CBPS became a new division within DHS, eventually growing to 85 employees with a budget of $96 million supporting over 200 community-based programs aimed at preventing child abuse, neglect and delinquency.
During his tenure, Fair took a leadership role in efforts to reduce Philadelphia's high school dropout rate, co-founding Project U-Turn;[42] started the Parenting Collaborative,[43] the city's first large-scale effort to provide parent education and support services to high-risk families; expanded truancy and delinquency prevention services;[44] and helped create a number of older youth programs, including the Achieving Independence Center (for aging-out foster youth) and the Achieving Reunification Center (for families seeking reunification with their children in foster care).
In 2007, Fair began publishing an online weekly newsletter for United Way called "What Matters," which highlighted news and events of interest to the Philadelphia-area nonprofit community.
After mergers resulted in the new United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey in 2012, the name of the newsletter was changed to Common Good.
After Turning Points affiliated with Public Health Management Corporation, Fair led an effort to help the organization compete for contracts with DHS for a new program called Improving Outcomes for Children, which privatized child welfare services in the city, and which eventually led to TPFC obtaining contracts to serve over 2500 families in four of ten regions of the city and increasing the annual TPFC budget to over $62 million.
He currently (2023) chairs three nonprofit boards (a family mental health center, a STEM education group, and a group advocating for homeless youth), and is an officer or board member at six others, including a recovery high school, a tenant rights organization, a senior center, a homeless service agency, an African immigrant service organization, and a small community foundation.
