Alicia Keys has been in the studio cooking up new music, but she took time out of her busy schedule to promote another one of her passions, philanthropy. The Grammy-winning singer was a guest speaker at the Social Innovation Summit at United Nations Plaza in New York City. She spoke about why she started her Keep a Child Alive foundation and how her trip to Africa in the early 2000s opened her eyes to the AIDS pandemic.
“It was human beings that I was meeting and seeing and coming in contact with and they were my age,” said Alicia. “They were five years younger than me and they had dealt with the most difficult, horrible circumstances and situations, and watched their parents just die and could do nothing about it because there was no way on Earth to access medicine.”
Hear her powerful words.