John Hilgeman  0:00  
Good morning. This is John Hilgeman for Lambda Reports, a program by and for the lesbian and gay community in the St. Louis area. Our guest this morning is Dr Elizabeth Price, Executive Director of St Louis Effort for AIDS, and we're glad to have you here. Elizabeth, 

Elizabeth Price  0:17  
I'm very glad to be with you, John, 

John Hilgeman  0:19  
Maybe you could tell us a little bit about St. Louis Effort for AIDS, how it started, and the work the organization does.

Elizabeth Price  0:25  
Well. Effort for AIDS is is old now. As AIDS service organizations go, it was founded in 1985 by a group of gay men who were were tired of the lack of services in the community for people with AIDS and who got together to try to ensure that something was done to help and that something was done to prevent the spread of the virus. This was really part of the first effort arising out of the gay community in St. Louis, though, of course, in other parts of the country, people had gotten together several years before, and so effort for AIDS looked to San Francisco organizations and so on for models of how to do this. And the programs originally established by volunteers for people with AIDS were modeled on ones that were already working pretty well in San Francisco. We have a buddy program where an individual volunteer helps one person with AIDS, befriends them and stays with them until they're no longer needed. And support groups, support groups for people with AIDS, for people who are seropositive, for relatives, friends, partners, lovers, and for the bereaved. And these programs, which originally started in 85 are still running now.

John Hilgeman  2:12  
What I'm wondering is how you became involved with St Louis effort for age you became involved about two years ago. Now, is it or a year and a half or so. 

Elizabeth Price  2:21  
Yeah, it's, it's, it'll be two years in in February, and it's really because some of the most enterprising volunteers at Effort for AIDS realized that the organization could not, in the long run, survive and serve the community of people with AIDS without some professional staff, and so they wrote a proposal to the St. Luke's Episcopal Presbyterian Charitable Foundation to get some seed money, to get some basic funding for three years, to hire an executive director and to begin to do some outreach into the community. So the this grant was awarded, and it was contingent upon St. Louis Effort for AIDS, doing some outreach into the broader community, particularly into the African American community. And when they got it, they started a hiring process, and I got involved with applying for that and so on, because I was down at Christ Church Cathedral, which was, that's my church, and I'm heavily involved in its social action programming. At Christ Church Cathedral, we had been involved with people with AIDS for several years already. A member of our congregation who was known to me, had had died, and probably more had, except we didn't know what it was, or people didn't talk about what it was. In any case, there was an incipient ministry to people with AIDS there, and when I was looking for the next vital thing that I thought we at the church when the community should be involved, and I didn't have to look it was right there on the doorstep. People were dying of AIDS. People were in danger of catching the virus. We we had to do something about it, and so I applied for that job.

John Hilgeman  4:45  
Now, what were you involved with before you became involved with EFA?

Elizabeth Price  4:48  
I was resettling refugees, and I had just finished a project of resettling Marielita Cubans in. We were resettling people who were incarcerated, usually without sentences or with expired sentences, and trying to resettle them into the community. The program, as far as I was concerned, was over, because government funding was no longer forthcoming to do this in a responsible and and careful way. Unfortunately, there were still Cubans who were incarcerated at the time that we were no longer able to take them out of jail. But it was a, it was a good program to to help some of us prepare for dealing with the issue of AIDS. Refugees often suffer a great deal from diseases. They can become very debilitated. They have similar needs for financial assistance and subsistence kinds of programs as some people with AIDS, and in that sense, it wasn't a bad preparation for trying to do some of the things we're trying to do now.

John Hilgeman  6:41  
Now, EFA has kind of gone on in, I don't know if I'd say it a different direction, but certainly taken a new kind of track since you've come on board, because there's a number of other people who have been hired for the organization, I think, out of necessity, because volunteers can only do so much. What who are some of the other people that are working on the staff of EFA? Or what kind of work do they do?

Elizabeth Price  7:12  
Well, it was essential to give Client Services an office base if you want to operate a system of financial support for PWA's legally and satisfy the requirements of the tax people and all kinds of liability issues. You have to keep good client records and really establish a Social Service Office. And Joyce Martin, who was one of our volunteers and one of our volunteer case managers, was hired originally to help me do that. Then when her husband moved out of town, we had a vacancy, and after a long search, it's it's hard to find people who are willing to or who can afford to work with AIDS, and who have also the necessary high level of skills and experience that we need. After this long search, we've now hired Augustine Paz, who was one of the people who helped resettle the Cubans here in town, but who has much more extensive social services experience than that. So he is on staff now. We have a young African American woman who helps in client services and who has been instrumental in enabling us to serve more African American clients, and who does outreach to various populations, including the prison population, and we're trying very hard in particular to reach African American women here in town. We're seeing, of course, as the figures rise, that women are at especially high risk right now, and particularly so in the minority communities. And we also wanted to expand our educational efforts beyond what could be done by volunteers. One of the very attractive things about EFA to me, when I was looking to work in AIDS, was very high level of competence of the volunteers. We have a lot of youngish gay professionals and some of the professions that are vital to provide the services. We have medical people, nurses, physiotherapists, health educators, and all of these people have volunteered their services to an amazing extent for EFA. What is needed in the way of staff is someone to coordinate all that in the office and make sure that everybody gets to where they're supposed to be at the right time in order to carry out the programs. What is needed is also someone in the office to direct the thrust of the educational efforts so that we're not duplicating the services of other organizations, and so we're keying into a planned educational effort that will really help the whole St. Louis area.

John Hilgeman  10:57  
Now, how are the staff? Where do the salaries for the staff come from. 

Elizabeth Price  11:00  
They come from grants. Our, as I explained, our St. Luke's grant provides money towards salaries for outreach that we can do, and we're allowed to do gay outreach, and it's the only gay outreach money we have. We're allowed to do a little of that under that grant, and we are definitely mandated to do lots of outreach to minority communities on that and we are also permitted to do healthcare outreach, outreach to to healthcare providers. And we have a grant from the health department, again, the whole thrust of that grant is outreach towards the minority community. We have recently become members of the United Way, brand new members, and you're kind of on probation for several years before you become a full-fledged United Way agency. But we're very pleased that we are a new member agency. We are not being given a very large allocation, yet United Way is under pressure from the economic developments in the area, just like everybody else, but they are going to give us an allocation for the client services director, and that so far is the only money we have for client services. But United Way is specifically underwriting staff support for client services. So and we cannot expand the staff in any way now, until we receive some money to do that, we have proposals out in the local community and nationally to fund specific outreaches we would like to do. We'd love to do a teen outreach with a really imaginative volunteer program for teenagers with their own hotline and camp-outs and so on around AIDS prevention topics, and we'd love to do a college campus outreach. We get to do some of that now on volunteer power and scrounging, we'd like to have a grant to make a real thrust on the college campuses here in the area, both the community colleges and the four year colleges try to make sure that the infection rate there, which is very high right now, something like three in a 1000 try to get that down and try at least to prevent it from from spreading any further.

John Hilgeman  14:16  
This is we're just going to pause for a second to say this is John Hilgeman for Lambda Reports with Elizabeth Price, Executive Director of St. Louis Effort for AIDS, and Elizabeth you've just been talking about how money for different positions in the organization comes from grants, and that the employees are paid by money raised for grants. And talking about some of the things that you'd like to see happening. So if there's anybody listening to this program who would happen to have spare funds that they want to donate for a position for outreach to teenagers and college students and

Elizabeth Price  14:56  
And to gays, 

John Hilgeman  14:56  
okay, 

Elizabeth Price  14:57  
who really want to do gay outreach in a being? Way, it's rumored around here that gay people are getting tired of safer sex practices. They're getting tired of the whole issue because they wish it would go away. They fantasize that it has gone away, and so there's a lot of risky behaviors out there among young gay people. We need to counteract that absolutely fatal attitude. And so, yeah, we're pretty desperately looking for money to do gay outreach, and we're busy persuading the health department that some of the public money needs to go there, and this is difficult to do politically, of course. 

Has any public money going to EFA to help with with programs?

Minority outreach money is the only kind we cannot we can access right now, and we can write some, some other kinds of outreaches on that. For example, they do give us a very small grant towards our newsletter, which is obviously read by by all kinds of people. And they also make a grant towards a hotline which anyone can use.

John Hilgeman  16:20  
Okay, who's making the grants? Is it city? 

Elizabeth Price  16:23  
That is CDC money, which is filtered through the State, which is then filtered through the City, 

John Hilgeman  16:28  
okay, 

Elizabeth Price  16:29  
so, but it's CDC money, and all CDC money is for prevention, okay? And the the local effort here in St Louis is concentrated on outreach to the African American community. So that's that's the public money we're accessing right now. But boy have we tried in the last year and a half since we've had any staff to try with, have we tried to persuade the State to look at the plight of the people who are already infected, and who, after all, are a potential source of infection to others, who need treatment for humanitarian reasons, but also for epidemiological reasons. We have put tremendous energy into persuading the state, into persuading the legislature to loosen up some money for that, and so far, we've had no luck.

John Hilgeman  17:28  
Why do you think that is?

Elizabeth Price  17:30  
Well, because people still think it's a gay disease, and because the gay community in St. Louis still doesn't have very much political clout. I mean, I think in order to move legislators, you have to be able to move some votes. And we who are working with the issue, need, need to get the voters with us, so that we need to get everybody to see that it's everybody's problem and that no one is immune to the virus, and that part of preventing this disease from killing off all our kids and friends, part of doing that is is treating people who are already sick. And in any case, I think we need to let the community know more about the plight of people who have AIDS. I think by now, many people will will know something about sufferings with people in New York or San Francisco, but the fact that it's happening right here in St. Louis, and that we're not a very nice place to live if we let that happen without intervening in a big way.

John Hilgeman  18:57  
Now, St. Louis effort for AIDS has traditionally given some funds to people who have AIDS who have needs. Isn't that correct?

Elizabeth Price  19:07  
Well, in 85 that was number one priority, because people who were getting AIDS then had this incredible experience of not only becoming very sick, but also becoming very poor very fast, and not knowing how to deal with this sudden imposition of poverty. And what friends rushed to do was raise funds for them to try to to at least allow them to stay in their familiar normal surroundings, which meant coming up with rather hefty rents and and subsidies for for utilities, and so on, at quite a high level. The other thing people who suddenly found themselves infected and ill had never had any experience in accessing social security benefits for disabilities, SSD, SSI, had never dealt with the welfare office before. Nobody around that community, the volunteers, the people who themselves were affected, knew the ropes of handling these offices, and the benefits were really hard to access for a population that normally were nowhere near them. Nowadays, we're finding that while Missouri has remarkably low benefits, the benefits available through the welfare office here in St. Louis are among the very lowest in the whole country, 48th or 49th among all the states. While they remain so low, we do have ways of accessing them, and EFA has has we've made it our business to know how to get hold of those benefits as fast as possible, and we've made it our business to agitate and lobby to do away with some of the barriers, and some of this has worked. There is Medicaid. The Medicaid program, again, is is not a generous one, to say the least, compared with some other places, California is, of course, one of the best, if not the best. Comparatively, our Medicaid program is awful, but it is nevertheless very useful, and it has had some additions made to it, specifically for people with AIDS. There is a waiver program whereby you can get home health care. There is a mechanism of exemption, whereby medicines who are not on the general list, and that includes practically everything that anybody with AIDS would need, whereby these medications can be made available to people with AIDS. And all of this has been very painful to acquire. It's been a slow and terrible process, but these benefits are now available more easily to people with AIDS.

John Hilgeman  22:52  
One thing I'd like to directly address, just to clear up any misconceptions, I know some people have been thinking, well, if they give money to to EFA, it goes to pay people's salaries, and it doesn't go to help people who really need it. Whereas they have a notion that in the past, when people weren't paid salaries, that money went went to the people that needed it. Maybe you could just clear up that misconception.

Elizabeth Price  23:17  
Yeah, well as donations, as such, are not used for salaries. Many of our donations are specifically earmarked for client services, for for giving to people with AIDS to provide assistance that they need during during their illness. Other donations are specifically for education and prevention, and a lot of the money that comes into the organization is so designated, and we certainly have an accounting system that clearly differentiates between these funds. We also have an independent audit, which ensures that we do not, in fact, spend money designated for one thing on another thing, and we don't spend private donations on on salaries. Of course, it always will cost something to run an organization, and it always has. The, the larger an organization gets, the larger your organizational overheads are likely to get. But ours are at an extremely acceptable level at around about 15% at this time, which for an organization of our size is quite phenomenal. I mean, it means that EFA is not an expensive organization to run. I would imagine that one of the things that people imagine, imagine a lot of money goes on our new offices. And in a sense, that's true, EFA outgrew the capacity to to live off other organizations, space-wise. At first, space was donated by the MCC Church, and an EFA enjoyed the hospitality of that church for quite a while, and then a very tiny office was found at the top of the Red Cross building this base also, while we paid rent, was heavily subsidized by the Red Cross, but the organization outgrew the Red Cross. We just had so many meetings, so many people coming, so much activity, that the Red Cross could no longer afford to subsidize our activities to that extent, and so we were forced to create our own organizational space, and that doesn't come free, but believe me, every effort has been made to find the cheapest, acceptable solution. So we're in, well, we're, I think we're in a nice place and in a good place, a good place where we can reach the most people who need us. We, we pay the lowest possible rent for that. But there's no doubt, there's costs associated with that that we didn't have when people were donating basement space or attic space to us.

John Hilgeman  26:57  
Maybe if, if people are interested in contacting EFA, they could get a piece of paper and a pencil right now, I don't know how many people have pencils and paper right by their by their radio, but could you tell people who they could call? Who could they call at EFA?

Elizabeth Price  27:17  
Do call the Hotline about all kinds of things. At 367-8400. The Hotline is our line to you for anything you would like to ask us about or say to us, you can call the Hotline for AIDS Information, of course, information about transmission, information about the disease, though, usually we don't actually have MD'S on the line, but you can also call to ask about the services we have available, and you can call to ask about volunteering, and you can certainly call to ask about giving us money. We'd be delighted to tell you how to do that. 

John Hilgeman  28:05  
Okay, so that number, again, is 367-8400 the Hotline for EFA. Well, I've certainly been impressed by the programs that I've seen that have been done at EFA over the last few years, that I've been associated with the organization, with the dedication of the volunteers, with your dedication, and the dedication of the other employees there. And I know with any organization, there's, you know, any human organization, there's problems and conflicts. But on the whole, I think the organization has run very well, and the focus of the members has been very much on meeting the challenge of AIDS, on responding to the needs of people with AIDS, and on really trying to get out information to help prevent the spread of AIDS. So I thank you very much Dr. Elizabeth Price, Executive Director of St. Louis Effort for AIDS for being with us this morning. This is John Hilgeman for Lambda Reports, a program by and for the lesbian and gay community in the St. Louis area. Hope you can join us again next week at the same time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai