BEING ALIVE; April 1995
Walt Senterfitt, Board President

As we began our new fiscal and program year April 1, the contrast could hardly be more striking. We have more than $100,000 in the bank. The Board just approved an annual budget of more than $600,000 that was based on accurate, comprehensive financial management data and realistically projects a small surplus. Our new Executive Director, Gary Costa, is performing with almost superhuman efficiency and dedication. The Board has several energetic new members and is led by a true collective, with particularly noticeable and sustained contributions by Vice-Presidents Mary Lucey and Ric Parish and Treasurer Jim Stoecker. New programs have started or been planned that emanated from the rank and file membership. Long-time volunteers have stepped forward to assume new responsibilities and new volunteers have joined our ranks.

We have a ton of work to do to implement our new plans and continue to grow. We have some important weaknesses. However, I am enormously proud of the regenerative capacity our organization has shown. I am proud of the hundreds of members who found and gave the energy, creativity and inspiration to maintain Being Alive's vitality as the only major organization in Los Angeles of and for people with AIDS and HIV. I believe that Being Alive, foremost among AIDS organizations in our area, exemplifies adherence to its mission, strong and accountable leadership, responsiveness to changing community needs, and effective control by its rank and file membership.

Let me be more specific, lest you think I'm just writing advertising copy. Board, Staff and Diversity

The Board currently includes a mix of long-timers, newer leaders and brand new representatives of important constituencies. Larry Long and David Inman, for instance, have both been around for quite a while and represent one of our longest standing core programs, the support groups. Mary Lucey, Jim Stoecker and I have been around a shorter time, and have worked longest with the Newsletter and women's outreach. Ric Parish joined as a pioneer link to the Asian/Pacific Islander community and the gay men of color communities in general. We've recently been strengthened by the addition of Karen Raub, Jenny Cook, Danny Jenkins, Juan Ledesma, Sean Griffin and Brad Land. Collectively, they represent important internal constituencies like Women Alive, Positive Teens and Twenties and the West Hollywood satellite office. They also represent links, incipient coalitions if you will, with communities of color, people with histories of substance abuse and other community organizations. The Board's increased cohesiveness and functioning as a collective is apparent to any fair eye. We still need more representation from the African-American and Latino/a communities and from among those with "full blown" AIDS.

The current staff of four is also diverse. More importantly, its effort is productive and efficient and its morale is high. Credit goes to the staff members' experience and hard work, the skillful leadership of Gary and the support of the Board's staff liaison, Ric Parish. Our staff work well because they believe in their mission and they are working in part for themselves.

Remaining Weaknesses

We have become increasingly aware that we often lose touch with members, and consequently often don't offer the support we could, in the last weeks or months of their lives. More broadly, some members with late stage AIDS have pointed out that not enough programs have been provided specifically for them and that others sometimes seem insensitive to the particular issues of the most seriously ill.

Our multiculturalism is still partial in practice. We have a long history of support groups and newsletter pages in Spanish, but the core leadership of and for this part of our family has just begun to be rebuilt. Likewise, African-Americans have been well-represented in social events and women's programs, but we have a ways to go in ensuring that this part of our family feels at home and has a clear piece of the action. Our outreach to women of all colors is probably our most notable success. Surveys of HIV+ women frequently cite Being Alive as the most important organization for them, bar none.

We aren't well enough known. Earlier on, we grew not only through word of mouth, but also with the aid of aggressive advertising and outreach. That effort has slackened in the last few years. Consequently many potential members, friends and financial supporters don't know about us.

New Programs for the New Year

Integrated with our recently completed budgeting process was a series of decisions about which new programs we wanted to commit to for the coming year. The Board has allocated some funds for each of these, and provided for some additional staff energy, but none of them will be a success in fact if the human resources aren't developed. This means members to step forward to take responsibility and others to volunteer to help staff them. First on the agenda is increased sensitivity to and programming for PWAs. A PWA Advisory Committee has just been formed and is actively planning to solicit ideas and make suggestions. We want as well to start a kind of "buddy" program, so that members are always in touch with Being Alive, no matter how ill, homebound or disabled they become. We also plan to start, at first gradually, a program of daytime social and recreational activities in the Silver Lake office.

The Board committed more than $20,000 of the next year's budget to advertising and outreach. A volunteer committee has been formed to develop a specific plan that aims at several different segments of our community. We plan to continue our expansion and coordination of women's activities. We have received funding to start a telephone Hotline for and staffed by HIV+ women. The new staff member who will coordinate this project will also serve as a general coordinator of women's programs at the Silver Lake, West Hollywood and Culver City offices.

We are in negotiations to establish small branches of our excellent library in the offices of various other community based AIDS organizations, especially those serving primarily people of color. Not only will this help us more widely disseminate the information we collect, but it should also help us strengthen joint work with minority community organizations. We will try again to establish a treatment activism and advocacy group. The aim is to provide a base for those interested in following the cutting edge of treatment research and working together to fight for faster and broader access to new therapies.

We plan to help stabilize the rejuvenated West Hollywood satellite office by hiring a half-time staff coordinator. Similarly, we have decided to reinforce the arduous work of newsletter production month after month by hiring a half-time staff assistant to the editorial and production committee (which will continue to be all volunteer).

Conclusion

We continue to struggle for the right balance between growth and maintenance of our grassroots and family nature. We continually remind ourselves that we don't want to become another APLA (or AHF or ASC) with bureaucracy and careerism that are inevitable accouterments of rapid growth and institutionalization. No manual exists to show us where to draw the line. We'll probably always stumble along through the method of successive approximation. One concrete step we're taking this year is to consciously reduce the proportion of our funding that comes from government grants and contracts.

We need to think about long range planning, though that will always be problematic in an organization of and for people with HIV and AIDS. I particularly welcome the recent explosion of interest in our volunteer fund raising committee. Against a lot of advice, we've decided to continue to do our own fund raising without help of outside contractors or professionals.

Somberly and gratefully, we dedicate this next year to those who have fallen in the past one. I particularly dedicate my efforts over this next year to Kyle Burton who died just before we went to press and was responsible for the incredible success of this year's Spirit of Hope Awards dinner, the proceeds from which pushed us up from the brink of poverty; to Gilbert Cornilliet, crucial to the Newsletter's longevity, to the origin of the Sunday socials, and a dozen other things; to Lori Levine, our first woman staff member and the one who started us down the road to becoming an organization of and for HIV+ women, as well as men; to Sean Kinney, a former Board President, eloquent newsletter writer and builder of consensus; and to Dave Johnson, our first Executive Director and later LA City AIDS Coordinator who in his last year rejoined the Board. I invite you to make your own list of heroes, and dedicate part of your next year to memorializing them through the work of building this living, breathing, evolving family we call Being Alive.

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