Subject: B.A.R.: Town meeting blasts SF AIDS Foundation
From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 1997 00:30:05 -0500 (EST)

Town meeting blasts AIDS Foundation
by Mark Mardon (From the Bay Area Reporter, October 30, 1979)
[Letters can be sent to the editor of the B.A.R. at 395 Ninth Steet, SF, CA,
94103.]

	By all indications, the revolt has been a long time coming. After years of
mounting frustration, people with HIV and AIDS finally rose up in fury at a
public meeting Tuesday night to denounce the shabby treatment they've
received at the hands of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) and other
entrenched, ossified service organizations.
	The protesters came from all walks of life and reflected a broad
cross-section of the HIV and AIDS community, including women, men, Pacific
Islanders, Native Americans, blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, youth, and
elders, gay, bisexual, and straight. They spoke at times passionately,
repeatedly singling out the SFAF as a bloated bureaucracy so callous and
aloof that it routinely denies its own clients – people living with the virus
– basic services, respect, or even a voice in its affairs. They called for
the ouster of the SFAF's high-salaried executive director, Pat Christen, and
demanded its board meetings be open to the public and its directors elected
democratically rather than hand-picked with no community input.
	The tone of the meeting was set early on by one of several Native American
speakers, Peggy Taylor Campbell, who calmly yet with great dignity painted a
disturbing picture of the SFAF as cold and inattentive to a new client:
"Last year I arrived here in San Francisco in an unhealthy and unsafe
predicament," Campbell told a packed audience in the main sanctuary of the
Metropolitan Community Church. "After 18 years as a working single mother of
three, I ended up homeless and alone and a person with AIDS, unaware of how
to access any kind of services." Soon she found out about SFAF, "but when I
went there for help, their client services desk people were very unreceptive
towards me."
	Campbell said she was not informed, after filling out all the necessary
paper work, that to obtain housing through the agency, she was supposed to do
an initial client intake. "Being a working person, I didn't know to ask about
this, either."
Every week for six months, while staying in a hospital, Campbell asked SFAF
staff members when she would be placed on the housing list, but still no one
informed her about the intake requirement.
	 "I must say that my experience with the AIDS Foundation was an extreme
disappointment and built up a great mistrust," Campbell told the audience.
"Why can't I expect some kind of help from an organization that's paid to
help people? Instead, I received six months of neglect."

Inscrutable, impervious
	With Campbell's personal narrative still resonating in people's minds,
another keynote speaker took the stage to place her situation – and that of
others similarly disaffected by the SFAF – in a larger political and social
context.
Jeff Sheehy, president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Democratic
Club, observed that "the AIDS Foundation has basically taken the place of a
government in delivering services." The sharp difference, he added, is that
government representatives are accountable to their constituents. They can be
thrown out of office.
	"With the AIDS Foundation, we have none of this," said Sheehy. "What started
out as a partnership between the community and these emergent nonprofits has
become something that is top-down," with a decision-making process both
inscrutable to outsiders and impervious to the wishes of clients.
If it desires for any reason, the HIV Services Partnership (including SFAF,
Shanti, and the AIDS Health Project) can deny services to anyone, leaving
them effectively stranded, forced to cope with AIDS alone. As previously
reported by the B.A.R., that is exactly what happened in a recent case
involving Michael Petrelis, whom the Partnership excluded from services,
apparently as punishment for his having blown the whistle on the SFAF's
failure to accurately disclose its client focus-group results.
	"Can you imagine [San Francisco General Hospital] turning people away
because they don't like them," Sheehy asked, "because they don't like their
ideas, or because they're difficult to deal with?"
	Sheehy, whose organization, along with ACT UP/Golden Gate, the CARE
Council's PWA Caucus, and the Log Cabin Republican Club, convened the
community forum, said that despite claims by SFAF that such denials of
service are rare, statements by former employees of the organization indicate
otherwise.
Promises by SFAF to let the Milk Club examine its service suspension and
termination procedures proved hollow, said Sheehy.
	"We, at a minimum," declared Sheehy, "demand that before an AIDS service
organization [can] terminate or suspend someone's service, that they [the
client] have some advocate there, from some neutral party, so they are not
alone and powerless."

Insular, non-accountable
	For ACT UP/Golden Gate member Stephen LeBlanc, the SFAF's closed-door
actions pose threats not just to individuals, but to the entire HIV and AIDS
populace.
	LeBlanc, a lawyer, began scrutinizing the SFAF more than a year ago, after
the organization sought to divert half of the $100 million allocated by
Congress for AIDS-drug research into social services and counseling.
	"It's been a growing education in what a totally closed, totally insular,
completely non-accountable institution it is," LeBlanc told the audience.
What shocks him as a lawyer, he said, is that "we're dealing with an
institution that legally is structured fundamentally and in theory to be
entirely unaccountable to anyone."
	LeBlanc said the SFAF holds no elections, has no formal grievance
procedures, has not held an open community meeting in five years, and yet
handles a budget of $18 million. "Every time I ask a question about how
decisions are made or where money is spent, the decisions are always made in
closed meetings, and I just find this morally outrageous and reprehensible,"
he said.
	LeBlanc made his most potent point, drawing audience applause, when he said
he has "fewer avenues of access to the AIDS Foundation than I do to
Glaxo-Wellcome or to Merck." He was referring to two giant drug manufacturers
that have frequently been targets of ACT UP protests. At least with those
companies, he added, "there's some sort of stockholders meeting, and they're
actually beholden to some kind of public process."
	Given SFAF's continuing intransigence, said LeBlanc, one recourse would be
to go to the organization's funders and ask that they withhold donations. Yet
that would be a last resort, not something to be undertaken lightly. He hopes
that before such a step is taken, other efforts will prove effective in
achieving reform.

PWAs at the table
	One question that recurred repeatedly through the course of the evening was
why, in San Francisco, a major AIDS service organization could be operated
without adequate representation from its own clients. One speaker from the
Ryan White CARE Council, Tom Calvanese, made the point that the Maui AIDS
Foundation, which he and others started in Hawaii in 1985, had become a model
organization because it mandated that at least 25 percent of its board seats
be occupied by people with AIDS. "It should be a given," he said. "Every
agency should have to have people with AIDS and clients of that agency
sitting at the table where decisions are made."
	One after another during the town meeting, people rose to attest to the
inadequacy, incompetence, and sheer arrogance of the SFAF. Many told of
mistreatment at the hands of the organization, of being banned from SFAF
meetings for having disagreed with its policies and procedures. Some said the
agency's case managers make clients feel unwelcome. People said they felt
alienated and belittled by its unmoving, bureaucratic wall of indifference.
Repeatedly, they decried the apparent injustice of an organization whose
executive director earns $140,000 a year, yet fails to provide clients with
even basic services. They told of being "blackmailed" or smeared by the
organization if they spoke out against it.
	The clear, compelling message from the people attending the forum was that
unless reform is achieved quickly, and the SFAF and other organizations of
its ilk become more responsive to clients, treating them with dignity and
opening a place for them at their table, the walls of the organization will
have to be stormed, by means of going to the press, to the city government,
to the voters, and to the funders. Until that happens, the people said, those
living with HIV and AIDS in the city will continue to feel they're
second-class citizens. 
>end<