Stephen Lewis admits that he has, in the past, doubted the contribution the Olympics can make to society’s greater good. That all changed in 1996, when the humanitarian and AIDS activist attended the Games south of the border.

“I’d always been skeptical about the equation between sports and social change, maybe because I’m not a sports enthusiast,” Lewis says on the line from his Hamilton, Ontario, home. “But I attended the Atlanta Olympic Games. I was there as deputy executive director of UNICEF. Through the Games, we raised millions of dollars to improve the lives of children.”¦That’s where I became interested in the use of the Olympics to raise awareness, consciousness, and money around children’s issues—in that particular case, child soldiers, child trafficking, and child labour. Instead of being skeptical and cynical, I thought maybe this is a vehicle after all”¦to convey significant messages.”

The former UN secretary general’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and chair of the Stephen Lewis Foundation—which strives to prevent HIV/AIDS and help people living with the disease in sub-Saharan Africa—clearly hopes that much more will come out of Vancouver’s turn to host than stories of athletic achievement. To that end, he’ll be speaking at 11 a.m. on Friday (February 12) as part of Sport and Society, a five-part dialogue series taking place at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts over the next few weeks. Presented by UBC and featuring activists, scientists, researchers, and Olympic and Paralympic athletes, the public sessions aim to address the potential impact of the Games on a variety of social issues.

Lewis will participate in the talk entitled “Sport, peace, and development: how can sport contribute to positive social change?”. Joining him, among others, is Johann Olav Koss, four-time Olympic speed-skating gold medallist and president and CEO of Right to Play International, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the health and well-being of children in some of the globe’s most troubled regions through physical activity.

“Johann is the one most responsible for getting kids, primarily through the use of soccer, to understand the message of prevention that’s part of my world—HIV—and that has been done with great intelligence,” Lewis says, noting that the right to play is included in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Coaches or Right to Play staff or celebrated athletes play soccer with kids and use their time together to also talk about the dangers of HIV, the need to use condoms, the importance of having only one partner, and the delay of onset of sexual activity. So I’ve converted to recognize that there’s an awful lot of good that the use of sports as a vehicle can do to raise awareness and help with prevention.

“Kids love to play, particularly orphaned children,” he adds. “It helps compensate for loss. It’s a way of sublimating grief. They do it through play. If, in the course of all that, we’re preventing them from getting the disease that killed their parents, then there’s a lovely symmetry to that.”

Lewis mentions orphaned children in particular because their situation in sub-Saharan Africa is dire. There, about nine percent of kids have lost at least one parent to AIDS. As well, one in six households with children cares for at least one orphan.

“I’m constantly bewildered by the fact that no one seemed to intuit that, when millions of people are dying—with this tremendous loss of life—there would be millions of orphans,” he says. “The planning for orphans has been negligible. We’re talking 14, 15 million kids.

“They don’t have clothing, they don’t have food, they don’t have shelter, they don’t have money for school fees, they don’t have health assurances; if it wasn’t for so many grandmothers, God knows who would be looking after them.”

Also joining Lewis at the Chan Centre event are Benjamin Nzobonankira, a former child refugee from Burundi and a project supervisor with Right to Play; Wilfried Lemke, special adviser to the UN secretary general on sport for development and peace; and Stephen Toope, president and vice chancellor of UBC.

Sid Katz, a UBC professor and executive director of the university’s community affairs department, initiated the Sport and Society series.

“As a university, I felt we should be out there asking the right questions and getting people to try to respond on how sport is fitting into society and contributing to making it better, or whether we are deluding ourselves into thinking it’s more than it is,” says Katz, who’s also the managing director of the Chan Centre, in a phone interview. “I wanted to find out how Olympic and Paralympic athletes have used their celebrity to make a difference, to make change in the world.”

The series, which kicked off on February 8 with a discussion about ethics and technology in sport, will also cover inclusion in sport (March 5), the removal of barriers for people with disabilities (March 10), and Olympic legacy and sustainability (March 13). (More details are at www.chancentre.com/.)

Although the wealth on display during the Olympics couldn’t be further removed from the state of affairs in Africa, Lewis can’t refute the power of the spotlight.

“I’m always put off by the lavish excess of modern capitalism, regardless of where it’s practised,” Lewis says. “But I don’t want to remove the possibility of saving kids by getting information on HIV to them.”