AIDS Walk Colorado

Schedule of Events

Join the Colorado AIDS Project and the walkers, runners, volunteers and other participants for AIDS Walk Colorado and AIDS Run Colorado on Saturday, September 6 at Cheesman Park. Check out the schedule and map below to find out what’s going on and where you’re going. And find out more about event changes for 2008 on page 6 of this issue of Out Front Colorado.

Saturday, September 6:

8:30 - 10 a.m.
Registration
10 a.m.
Opening Ceremony
10:30 a.m.
Step Off
11 a.m.
Beer Garden Opens
First Entertainment Begins (TBA)
Noon
Runner Awards and Closing Ceremony
12:30 p.m.
Second Entertainment Begins (TBA)
Registration Closes
2:30 p.m.
Third Entertainment Begins (TBA)
4 p.m.
Beer Garden
Closes/Event Ends

Sunday, September 7:

4 p.m. - close
Official AIDS Walk Colorado
Day After Party at Vinyl
A portion of the proceeds will benefit Colorado AIDS Project
Sponsored by CafeVivid.com, DJ Tatiana and Out Front Colorado.

A CAP-full of services

By Jerry L. Wheeler

You’ve got your AIDS Walk pledge sheet full and collected your money, broken in those new walking shoes and even trained the dog to walk beside you without nipping at bystanders – but do you know what Colorado AIDS Project (CAP) does with the money you’re walking to raise?

“We have prevention, education and outreach on one side,” states Michael Lee, CAP’s director of communications, “and then we have our direct client services on the other.”

Prevention, education and outreach include programs for women and youth as well as an “AIDS 101” course for people unfamiliar with the disease. HIV testing also falls under this umbrella, and testing is done at CAP as well as several other locations in the metro area.

“We’re in the process of refocusing our prevention,” says Lee, “and we’re really targeting two areas. About 77 percent of the HIV infection in Colorado is happening in the MSM (men who have sex with men) community. With that, we’re really going to be re-engaging with that community here in Colorado – in Denver, specifically. The other area we’re focusing on is youth.”

The reason for refocusing on youth is that, in the past few years, many Colorado school districts have accepted federal Title V funding, which has been tied to abstinence-only sex education, meaning that the only HIV prevention method that could be discussed was abstinence. This year, however, the state turned down that funding.

“We weren’t teaching our young people the facts about how to protect themselves,” Lee says. “Last year, we were part of a bill signed into law providing for comprehensive science-based sex education. It’s state law now, and we’re working with a collaborative group on how we implement that and get science-based sex education back into the schools.”

“We’re going to continue working with communities of color and continue working with faith communities,” Lee continues. “There are a lot of great organizations that are very targeted on to those specific areas, but we see the MSM community and youth – in terms of science-based sex education – as the two biggest areas we want to focus on.”

What about the direct client services? “Our direct client services,” Lee explains, “include the food bank, financial assistance, employment assistance, and we also do transportation assistance in the form of RTD tokens. We also have mental and substance abuse counseling, so we have licensed professional counselors on staff.”

“The bulk of our work,” Lee continues, “is done through our case management. They make sure our clients are tied into health care, that they’re tied into housing, that they’re able to manage their disease – if you don’t have a roof over your head, if you don’t have food every day, it’s really difficult to make sure you’re taking your meds. So our case managers help our clients navigate all the many government programs, from Social Security to AIDS Drug Assistance Program to the Section 8 housing programs. They advocate for clients in all those realms.”

Advocacy is key, because the majority of CAP’s client base these days comes from lower-income to poverty-level households. Also key is employment services.

“A large portion of our clients have either been intermittently or totally homeless until entering our program,” says Ruth Pederson, CAP’s new executive director. “What we’re doing is bringing them up to a basic level of putting together resumes. Our employment coordinator is trying to get a network of specific employers that we can reach out to to help clients get jobs. We’re trying to define what success would look like to a client who comes here, and one of the things would be that you were able to have a job and be self-sustaining in housing. A job is a pretty big part of that.”

Those are some pretty big responsibilities, but CAP seems to be less visible in fundraising than many other organizations in recent years. Lee agrees. “When you look at the history of the AIDS Walk,” he states, “it mirrors the history of the disease. Until 1997, it was the disease du jour. You couldn’t watch an awards show without seeing celebrities wearing red ribbons – that’s when we peaked. We were at $1.4 million raised that year, and we’ve seen a gradual slide from that high.”

The reason? “There so many worthy causes out there that we’re competing against,” Lee continues. “Every weekend there seems to be a walk or a run of some kind. The sponsors and the pool of participants supporting them haven’t grown that much, but the competition has grown exponentially. Because the event is making less money, we have a responsibility to spend our money wisely and look at the recruitment vehicles that are working. We don’t want to be throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.”

Another factor appears to be the general perception the public has that AIDS has been cured. “We want to continue to work to bring HIV/AIDS back into the social conversation,” says Lee, “but it’s more important for us to stop the disease – to work one-on-one with the high-risk populations because, ultimately, we would love it if that perception was true.”

For more info or to register for the Walk, visit www.coloradoaidsproject.org.

CAP ‘banks’ on nutrition

By Jerry L. Wheeler

HIV positive or not, you can’t manage your health if you don’t eat properly, and one of the services provided by the Colorado AIDS Project (CAP) is their food bank. Feeding clients for 21 years, the food bank has grown from very humble origins.

“It started August 1987,” says the current food bank coordinator, Diana Cable, ”and it was literally a closet where someone donated food, and they dispersed it to whoever needed it at the time. It’s just built up since then. They started getting a budget and buying for it instead of just relying on donations. Now, we give clients a third of what they need in terms of caloric intake for an HIV-positive individual, with the assumption that they will probably access another food bank for another third and then, hopefully, have food stamps or money or some other means to fill in the last third.”

Where does Cable get food for the bank? “The majority of our food is purchased from a variety of different places,” she states. “I purchase meats from a specific place, and some stuff comes from Food Bank of the Rockies. We access most of our canned veggies from Kuner’s, we have some donations and we’re on the list for the Denver Urban Gardens, which is community-supported agriculture. We’re able to get a share and a half from them – fresh stuff that’s grown organically, like cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, zucchinis, greens, spinach, beets – about 20 to 30 pounds of whatever they grow.”

How does the food bank work for CAP clients? “It’s a signature thing,” she explains. “They’ve all got a card with a five-digit number, and that’s all we use to track it, so there’s confidentiality that way. We just initial that they came in, and they initial that they’ve been here. It’s set up so there’s a limit they can get for each food group, but there’s some choice as to what they can get for that group. For example, they can get three vegetables – fresh, frozen or canned, in any combination they want.”

Although much of the food is purchased, Cable has noticed some difference in the availability of items from local food banks recently due to the poor economy. “Food Bank of the Rockies, who we have to pre-order from, has changed considerably,” Cable states. “We used to buy about 15 to 20 cases of cereal without any problem. Whenever we needed it, we’d order it. Now, we’re limited to two of this and two of that. We also hear about what our clients are going through outside of what they’re getting here.”

Nutrition and cooking classes have been available in the past from CAP’s food bank, and they’ve been very successful. “The dieticians came here and saw what we had on the shelves, then they talked with their chef and based their recipes on that. But some dieticians aren’t familiar with HIV-positive concerns. There are some foods we’d never ever put out, like honey, because it’s not pasteurized. We’d never put grapefruit out either – so many of the HIV meds are adversely affected by them in a couple of ways. It either increases the dosage or drops the dosage – and some of our clients are taking other meds grapefruit’s not good for.”

On the other hand, some foods are extremely beneficial. “There are also super-foods we always put out when we get them,” says Cable. “Some of them we have pretty much all the time, like oranges and tomatoes – but we always like to put out nuts and blueberries when we can get them. We like to focus on the foods that give you the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak.”

Counting, weighing, stocking, keeping track – running a food bank is pretty labor intensive, yet Cable has been doing it since 1999. What keeps her coming to work every day? “It’s nice to see that little smile,” she says. “When you have the same people coming in week after week, you learn about their family or things going on in their life, so you just chat like it’s your next-door neighbor. It becomes like going to church once a week and seeing all your friends. I like what I do.” And her clients like that she’s there doing it.

For more information or to make a donation, visit www.coloradoaidsproject.org.