After almost three decades into the epidemic, the federal government is finally drafting a nation AIDS policy, and community leaders want you to know that your input is important.

The Office of National AIDS Policy has set up a “call to action” page, where you can send them your thoughts, 5000 characters at a time, for consideration as the Obama Administration drafts a new National AIDS Policy. And they want everyone to write in. According to Peter Carr, the head of the Minnesota Department of Health’s HIV and STI section, “we want everyone who deals with the issue of HIV personally or professionally to [give input].”

This input will be fed to a committee, led by the ONAP and drawing members from the different federal agencies that serve the HIV/AIDS community.

While the “Call To Action” is open to anyone, several Minnesota HIV/AIDS advocates and service providers have some strong ideas about how to improve government policies, which are being pushed behind the scenes. Here’s the skinny: these groups want more funding for prevention and a more equitable distribution of funds among communities hit hardest by the disease.

“About four cents on the dollar.” That’s how much federal money currently goes towards prevention efforts, according to researcher and consultant Juan Jackson. “Of that money [spent on prevention efforts], so much is actually spent in administration at the state level that by the time they get it out to direct prevention services, to groups actually delivering interventions, it’s actually more like two cents on the dollar.”

Both Amy Brugh, the Public Policy Director for the Minnesota AIDS Project, and Gwen Velez, Executive Director of the African-American Aids Task Force, agreed that this was a big problem. Velez said some days prevention efforts feel almost non-existent compared to what the community needs. “That would be at the top of my list,” she said.

But Velez said she’s also very concerned that current HIV/AIDS spending doesn’t allocate money to programs that could change the disease’s disproportionate impact on African-Americans. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a well-respected source of data and analysis on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, while African-Americans form 12 percent of the national population, 45 percent of new HIV infections in the US were black. And 11.2 percent of all people living with HIV/AIDS in America are black and that number is skyrocketing.

“Nation-wide the money allocated doesn’t reflect the face of AIDS,” Velez said. “The money is not dedicated to specific programs that could shift these numbers.”