Bay Area Reporter - July 20, 2001
Katie Szymanski

Although not a cent of the funding had materialized as of late last year, DuPont kicked in $400,000 of the $1 million it had promised after the recent surge in HIV infections was announced last summer. The city matched that money to make a total of $800,000, which will be dispersed through four different health initiatives designed to combat HIV infection, according to a statement released by both parties.

But for all the city's talk of the need for new prevention methods in the wake of the proclaimed increase in infection rates, this funding program falls short of fulfilling community needs, according to some local advocates. For starters, the largest portion of the money ($325,000) will go toward the opening of the "Castro Men's Health Initiative," a drop-in STD and HIV testing center whose services address prevention only after someone may be having unprotected sex. Additionally, the Castro neighborhood is predominately white and already home to existing HIV prevention resources, two facts that fly in the face of the acknowledgment of troubling data about HIV and people of color.

"In one sense the Castro obviously still needs to be addressed when it comes to HIV prevention," said David Wallace, director of development and communications for the Black Coalition on AIDS. "And yet on the other hand the fact that HIV still disproportionately affects black people means the resources need to be shifted to where there's very little to no prevention. They could stop giving money to Castro programs tomorrow, and they'd find ways to get it back. That's not the case with lesser-known agencies."

The DuPont/city proposal does include programs for African Americans, but at funding levels that advocates like Wallace believe are inadequate. The "Chlamydia Elimination Initiative," for instance, is based on alarming facts about teenage girls in the Bayview whose high rate of Chlamydia infections makes them two to three times more likely to acquire HIV, yet the program is given just $150,000 for its development. And the "African American Gay/Bisexual Men's HIV Prevention Social Marketing Initiative," according to Wallace, may not be able to make a dent in the community with just the $225,000 allocated.

"We just submitted a grant proposal for social marketing that came in at about $1.4 million," explained Wallace. "About $1 million was for billboards alone, and that was opting for the cheapest package. So $1.4 million is about the minimum you'd need to do a thorough job with social marketing to the black community."

A fourth initiative, answering the city's call for "prevention for positives," will receive just $100,000.

Wallace said his agency was not contacted for input into the fund allocation process. That process included a series of meetings, according to DuPont's associate director of public affairs David Rosen, mostly assembled by city officials. Mike Shriver, Mayor Willie Brown's adviser on HIV/AIDS policy, did not return phone calls to the Bay Area Reporter in time for deadline, but it is known that he has been advocating funding the Bayview Chlamydia program for quite some time.

Original plans called for half of the funding to be distributed through the city's HIV Prevention Planning Council, while the other half would be filtered through a prevention program chaired by Dr. Tom Coates, director of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California, San Francisco.

Although perhaps just a drop in the bucket now, more than $4 million is still expected from the grant program in the future, and that's where advocates like Wallace are optimistic that the populations most in need will receive culturally appropriate prevention.

African American men who have sex with men, although just 4 percent of San Francisco's GBT community, represent 12 percent of HIV cases, according to data from DuPont. About half of all MTF transgenders with HIV are African American, and African American adolescents shoulder the heaviest burden of Chlamydia infections in San Francisco.
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