Dance4Life


Dance4life is an international youth initiative to raise awareness and promote prevention of HIV/AIDS.

Dance4Life

dance4life was founded in 2003 by two international marketers - Dennis Karpes and Ilco van der Linde - who were struck by the force of the HIV pandemic. They shared a passion to use their commercial expertise to turn this problem around. They envisioned a world united in pushing back HIV and AIDS, with one message: start dancing, stop AIDS.
dance4life has become an international youth movement. Its purpose is to create social change and empower young people to take action to push back HIV and AIDS. dance4life is about the belief that HIV and AIDS can and will be stopped the moment young people have the power to stand up and say no to unsafe sex.
Starting in three countries, and having expanded to 30 countries in 2012, dance4life has grown and shaped into a worldwide youth movement.
Since then dance4life has achieved the participation of 600,000 young teens in the "heart connection tour", 300,000 agents4change adolescents, the distribution of 3 million dance4life condoms to youth, over €3 million raised for local HIV prevention projects in the Global South, and a worldwide hit known as the "dance4life " anthem by Tiësto featuring Maxi Jazz between 2003 and 2006.
It has been estimated that by the Saturday before World AIDS Day 2014, the foundation will have created a total of one million agents4change. An agent4change is a young person who has participated in the dance4life "schools4life" and is involved in pushing back HIV and AIDS.
In 2004, during the first dance4life episode, thousands of people in the Netherlands, South Africa and Indonesia participated. dance4life chose a song called "Breathe Sunshine" by Dino Sofos as their official anthem. The song was also remixed by DJ Paul van Dyk, released on vinyl and CD worldwide and was played by Paul van Dyk and at all the dance4life world events over the course of 2004 and 2005.
As of May 2006, DJ Tiësto is the official worldwide ambassador for the dance4life foundation. He recorded a track with Maxi Jazz of the same name. The song peaked for five weeks in the Dutch Singles Chart, peaking at number five in Belgium, six in Finland and also charting in the UK and Germany.
In 2009 supermodel Doutzen Kroes became an ambassador. She visited dance4life projects in Tanzania, The United States, The Netherlands and Thailand and raised money through auctions for dance4life.

Schools4Life

Schools4life has nothing to do with books, preaching or homework, instead it is about dance, music, media, events, drumming, videos and taking the responsibility of living a life under protection. Using the language of people younger than 25 years the school begins with the Heart Connection Tour in which each school is visited by the dance4life tour team; The team is composed of dancers, musicians, peer educators and young people living with HIV. Students later take the responsibility by participating in "skills4life" which deals with the teaching of what is HIV and what it does to your body, other topics are its prevention, sexuality, drug abuse, and the rights of the teens, communication, and decision making. "Act4life" stands for taking action as a volunteer, fund raising or the spreading of the information as it is important to make people aware. To conclude schools4life, at the dance4life event which takes place every two years on the Saturday before World AIDS Day, on November 29, 2008 the agents of change are present at the event live or via satellite.

Ambassadors