John Hilgeman 0:01 Good morning. This is John Hilgeman for Lambda, Reports a program by and for the lesbian community and the gay community in the city of St. Louis. Our guest this morning is Lynn Cooper, Director of Doorways. And Lynn, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about Doorways and what it is Lynn Cooper 0:19 Sure John. Doorways is the interfaith effort to respond to the AIDS crisis in St Louis with compassionate care, specifically with housing. And started in August of 1988 Doorways has helped over 400 people with AIDS with housing or housing advocacy. John Hilgeman 0:38 Okay, what? How do you what kind of housing do you provide? How do you provide it? Lynn Cooper 0:43 Well, it's interesting. When we started out in 1988 we provided scattered site apartments in various locations in St. Louis, where we offered to a person with AIDS who was having a housing crisis a place to live complete with furnishings, utilities, telephone and so forth. Soon, we realized, though, that many people didn't need to be moved into another home. They just needed help to stay in their own home. And so we started a new program, a subsidy program, where we just gave people from $100 to $250 a month to be able to stay in their own home, subsidize their rent. Later, we realized some people only needed one or two little bits of help with their housing and those people. For those people, we started the emergency fund, a one time payment during a housing crisis. And just here lately, we've started the clearing house, which is for anybody who's HIV positive who needs help finding a house. We have a data bank of AIDS sensitive property managers and their available properties. We also help people get into such housing entitlements as the housing authority and other government sponsored housing opportunities. So we have four programs right now. We try to suit the program to the person's needs. Let's see. How did you get involved with Doorways? You've been involved for quite some time, right? Well, yes, I have about three and a half years ago, four years ago, the Interfaith Task Force on AIDS was a group of religious leaders in St. Louis city and county who were concerned about AIDS and who wanted to speak with a different voice than those fundamentalist people who would say that AIDS was God's punishment against gay people. Well, these religious leaders said that they didn't believe in that God, and they wanted to have a religious voice that said something different. At that time, they started the Interfaith Task Force on AIDS, and in that group, we did advocacy, we testified for some state committees, and we did education, and we even started training ministers and rabbis, lay people and ordain people to give pastoral care to people with AIDS. Soon we realized, however, that our work had to be concrete. We had to make some concrete contribution to the AIDS crisis. And at that time we started Doorways. That was early in 1988 and with the support of the Archbishop, the Jewish Federation, the Lutheran churches, the Episcopal Church, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ, United Methodist churches, all of those groups joined together with people from EFA and what was then called React, now the AIDS Foundation to start Doorways, separately incorporated organization to provide housing for people with AIDS. I guess the unique thing is that all of those religious leaders couldn't agree on everything, but the thing they could agree on was housing. Everyone in that group believed in compassionate care and one of the church's response and faith community's response to be one of acceptance and compassion. And so I started with the Interfaith Task Force, and later was on the founding board of Doorways. Last a year ago, November, we needed an executive director. I just finished some studies and was getting ready to pursue another position, and they said, Would you do this? Well, here I still am. So that's that's the short course. John Hilgeman 4:06 Okay, what kind of funding does Doorways get? I mean, you still get religious funding, funding from religious groups, churches? Lynn Cooper 4:13 That's right. So the original religious supporters, the Archdiocese of St Louis, and the Jewish Federation. There's several others that I mentioned, we've added we've added to our board the Black Clergy Coalition, places for persons with AIDS and but we've sought a diverse funding from several different places. The churches and the synagogue still support us to the tune of about $44,000 a year, not quite a fifth of our budget. But that's not enough to run a $288,000 organization on. And so we've also received funds from the AIDS Foundation, the United Way, the. Various private groups, the Rob Lee Foundation, $2,000 from Ralston Purina, this year. We're really excited about that, and we've done a lot of fundraising. We have a lot of individuals who have supported Doorways because they know someone we've helped, and they believe in the work we do. John Hilgeman 5:17 I have a letter here that was sent, I guess, to the station, and and I know one of the things that mentioned is that you have stories of different people that you would like to share, and maybe you could do that. Lynn Cooper 5:31 Oh, sure, we've had many, many clients come and go in Doorways. Unfortunately, a few of them have just moved away. Most of them have died. I guess one of the most memorable for me was a little seven month old baby girl who struggled for a long time had almost every opportunistic illness known by the time she was six months old, and held on till about Easter of last year. And so that was quite a blow we had been used to dealing with mostly young men, and that was tragic enough, dealing with beautiful young men, and then to be caught up in the life of a baby who died, was something that was difficult for all the staff. But there's also some stories of joy and grace. We are all. We're all, in a sense, terminal. And we learn sometimes from our clients with AIDS that living life to the fullest can be a good and a healthy and a happy thing. Some of our clients have said to us, one said to me one time, that since he had become ill, he had grown up as a human being. Very few of us are able to be thankful for such a tragic thing as AIDS. But in his case, he recognized it as a blessing for him to be more of a helper to others and to be more compassionate. We have one older woman in our program who has been a mother to many of the young men; they've adopted her. She's a grandmother, really. They've adopted her and depend on her a lot for comfort, consolation and counsel, and that's a blessing to us. We have a little boy who is growing deaf because of his disease, and is quite a clever person when it comes to sign language and lip-reading, and his mother says, Whenever he doesn't want to hear what she's saying, he simply turns his head so he doesn't have to see her. But the stories of our clients are often tragic, but many times they're grace-filled stories of joy and growth and kindness. Speaker 1 7:39 Do you find that people still run into a lot of housing discrimination, people with AIDS? Speaker 2 7:45 Yes, they do run into housing discrimination. Unfortunately, the first level of housing discrimination is often in their own family. Sometimes family members themselves are afraid or upset because people have AIDS, because it's so difficult still to be gay. A lot of people find out their brother or their husband or their son or their friend is gay at the same time they find out he has AIDS, and in those cases, very often, the family doesn't respond real well initially. Sometimes they come around, but sometimes they disown the person, and so the housing crisis comes as a result of being thrown out by a family member or friend or sometimes even a lover. Those are the most difficult ones. In terms of legal discrimination, most often it's not you can't live in my apartment because you have AIDS. Very often it'll be something more subtle, where if a person is late with his rent, the landlord might use that as an opportunity to try to start putting him out, where another person, they would say, well, make sure you get the rent in here tomorrow. So sometimes the discrimination is rather subtle. Sometimes it's just making the person feel afraid. If a person has AIDS and they have people in their neighborhood who frighten them, yell bad things at them, call them faggot, call, you know, yell something about AIDS or something like that, that's a kind of a discrimination, because eventually it drives them out of the neighborhood out of fear for themselves. So there is some discrimination. It's more subtle, often than overt. But what Doorways tries to do is create a setting for the person with AIDS where they can be as have as little stress as possible related to their housing, because we know people stay healthier longer when they have less stress. And so we try to help people find situations where landlords are kind and gentle and generous and neighbors are are warm, or possibly a situation where nobody would know that that person had AIDS. Speaker 1 9:44 So do you find many supportive landlords? Speaker 2 9:49 Oh, yes, it's, you'd be surprised at how many landlords even call on the phone and say, you know, last year, one of your guys lived over here, and I just. want to let you know that we got a couple of open units if, if there's someone else that needs them, we'd be glad to help you out. And sometimes we can even talk a landlord who is especially sensitive into lowering the price a little bit, knowing that the person may be on a fixed income or maybe that Doorways is subsidizing the person's rent, and there's a limit to what Doorways can do too. So very often we have landlords not only supportive but reaching out to us and saying, for whatever reason. I mean, maybe they just know that our money is green too, but, but we do have sometimes a landlord calling and saying, Well, I've got some units if y'all can use them, and we try to make use of those as often as possible, too. John Hilgeman 10:39 Now, at one point before Doorways was started, I think EFA was providing some kind of subsidies for people. So this really has pretty much taken that over and expanded it quite a bit as they … Lynn Cooper 10:50 It's done both of those things. One, one program that still remains is that when Doorways began, what we call our own home program, there were 31 people being subsidized with housing, rent and mortgage subsidies by EFA, and Doorways went to St Louis Effort for AIDS and said, We're grateful that you've been doing this for these people, but we feel like at least to some extent, it's our job. We didn't want them, the clients to have to go through a new intake procedure and all that sort of thing. So we said, let's let these people still be your clients, but we'll pay half of their rent. And so ever since then, Doorways has paid half of the rent on those clients, and now sadly, it's down to 12 clients, and we still pay half the rent. And the new clients come into doorways own home program, but those that were grandfathered in or grandmothered in under the old EFA policy, Doorways are still paying half of the subsidy on them, and we call that the joint client subsidy program, just so that they wouldn't have to make a transition from being EFAs clients to being Doorways clients. It seems simpler that we would just help EFA pay the bills. So so we do work very closely with St. Louis Effort for AIDS, and have been have depended upon them. They do the case management for many of our clients. We provide the housing service, and St. Louis Effort for AIDS provides, as you know, the Sharing Center and the hotline and case management services, the buddies, volunteer training, all those sorts of things. So we depend greatly on services of St. Louis Effort for AIDS, and we hope that together, we dovetail and are able to provide very high quality services without duplicating services. What kind of funding, if any, does the does the City State any other programs provide? I mean, you know, in terms of political institutions, I guess The public money has been slow in coming. A year ago, we were able to access $12,000 of FEMA money, federal, Federal Emergency Management Assistance Program, and with that money, we were able to support part of our emergency fund. The FEMA money is very difficult to use, and you can only use it under certain circumstances, and it has to be documented very, very carefully, so it doesn't apply to all of our clients, but when it does, and during the time that it's available. We use that. We have two, two little pieces of good news. And one is that the state has finally put some money in the budget for housing for people with AIDS, and $60,000 of that is coming to Doorways this year, and that will pass through the St. Louis Metropolitan AIDS Program operated by the City and County two Doorways. It's a contract between us and Metropolitan AIDS to take that State money and use it to house people with AIDS in St. Louis City and County. So we're really excited about that. That's new money. And then the other exciting thing is that we've been negotiating for the last several months for a building. Our clients, for the most part, want to live in one bedroom apartments, unless they have a family or a partner, and we tried it with roommates, and it didn't always work very well. So we have been seeking a one a building of one bedroom apartments, and we found it has to be rehabbed. So we need all kinds of electricians and plumbers and dry wall people and painters and every other kind of service provider, a skilled person that we can get. But we have this beautiful, 11 unit building that's being rehabbed for our clients, and we have written and received a $200,000 HUD grant, $75,000 for the rehab the first year, and the rest for operating the second and third year. So we're real excited about that. It'll be a building, just an apartment house. We'll let our clients live there, and if they want to participate in community services, they can if they want the privacy of their own space, they can have that, so absolutely independent living, no supervision or anything, unless it's requested. So we're real excited about that. So we've been doing well at accessing public money just here in the last in the last several months. Now, I have to tell you, we haven't seen any of it yet, but it's in the pipe. They promise us the money is in the pipe, so we're excited. John Hilgeman 15:22 Well, that sounds great. Yeah, this is John Hilgeman with Lambda Reports. We're talking today with Lynn Cooper from Doorways. And Lynn, I'm, you know, we're about halfway through the program, and I wonder if you could give a phone number that people could contact you and we can repeat it at the end of the show too. Lynn Cooper 15:40 Sure. Doorways phone number is 454-9599. John Hilgeman 15:44 okay, that's 454-9599. Lynn Cooper 15:51 Yeah. John Hilgeman 15:51 Okay, and I'm wondering what is, what is your background? Could you tell us a little bit about the things that brought you into the whole concern about AIDS and sure about housing for people with AIDS. Lynn Cooper 16:08 Well, I'm a retired high school teacher, and taught high school for seven years in Kansas City and Indianapolis, and spent several years working in North Georgia in a pastoral situation, running an education and family life program in a little county on the tippy tippy toe of Appalachia in North Georgia. And there I began to be associated with Habitat for Humanity. Many of you are familiar with the group from Americus, Georgia. You've probably seen pictures of former President Jimmy Carter working with Habitat, building houses for poor people, and I became associated with Habitat in North Georgia. And when I came to St. Louis, I was doing chaplaincy work. I was working as a chaplain at Barnes hospital. When I came to St. Louis, I was interested in becoming a part of Habitat. At the same time, however, the AIDS crisis was just beginning to become a part of our awareness in the mid 80s, and we were just becoming conscious 83, 84, 85, that something was wrong and something needed to be done. At that time, when I was a chaplain at Barnes, I joined the Interfaith Task Force on AIDS and had developed a specialty, a pastoral care specialty to people with AIDS, and began training ministers and lay leaders to do pastoral care with people with AIDS. So it's been something that's actually evolved. I am afraid that AIDS is going to go on for a while, even if no one was infected after today, we know that people who are already HIV positive may have 10, 12, 15 good years before they become ill. And so it's possible that we're dealing with at least a 20 year crisis, possibly longer. So it's, I certainly had no intention of doing work in AIDS and only a passing familiarity with work in housing, but it's just been somehow this all popped up on my journey, and at the time, it seemed like something I was very, very concerned about and wanted to be a part of when I became part of Doorways, there was a need for a director. I had already given a lot of time and energy to it, felt very, very, very important. Felt it was very, very, very important and and so was willing to commit a few years of my life to seeing if that organization couldn't keep going and doing good work. At that time we had, we had about 30 clients. Since then, we've served well over 100 with subsidies, and 300 more with advocacy and and counseling for housing advocacy. So my journey has been unplanned, very unplanned. I kind of stumbled into this. John Hilgeman 19:01 Well, a lot of times, I think that happens in life, we just kind of stumble Lynn Cooper 19:04 Yeah. John Hilgeman 19:04 and take it. Just kind of take roads that seem to make sense at the time. I'm wondering how, how St. Louis compares to other cities in terms of what's being provided for people with AIDS, the housing needs and what's being provided? Lynn Cooper 19:20 Well, of course, we haven't had the numbers of people with AIDS that the coasts have had. Both the East Coast and the West Coast have been harder hit, and some people assume that that's because that's the way the East Coast and the West Coast are. We need to work real hard at making people aware that we're still on the lower end of the curve in St. Louis. The Health Department believes there are 3200 people HIV infected in St Louis City and County, and so we've got to scramble to stay ahead of things. We took our first model for housing from the Shanty Project in San Francisco. They started out with scattered site residences in which clients could live, but we soon realized that we couldn't raise the kind of money to keep many of those residences going, and that furthermore, the majority of our clients had good homes and simply needed help to stay in them. When that happened, we realized that subsidies and accessing public entitlement housing was really the way to go, unless we were going to get those things, we weren't going to be able to stay open. And so what has happened is we wound up with a model plan. We are able to help 6070 people a month on $20,000 a month, where in other cities that have a yearly budget of over a million dollars, they may have 20, 30, 40 clients. So what we've wound up with here is a very streamlined model program that's very diverse, that matches housing needs to people's needs, and that encourages people to find the cheapest possible housing. One of the things that's very important, we believe, is keep our clients' housing costs below 25% of their income. As soon as housing costs go over 25% of the income, they begin spending medicine money and food money and money for other needs on housing. So if we can keep the cost of their housing below 25% by finding them inexpensive housing, or by subsidizing their housing, then we believe that we can help them live a healthier life, because then they'll use their medicine money to buy medicine and food money to buy food like they should be able to. There are several programs who have come to me, a priest, came up from Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi, just several months ago to help, ask for help in setting up something like Doorways. An Episcopal priest from Connecticut has written to us to ask for information in modeling after Doorways. And so, what we have displayed for people is the cheap way to do housing. AIDS is going to be a long commitment. It's It's unfortunate, but we know that we are here for the long haul, and so rather be a than be a flash in the pan, we're trying to find long term ways to manage long term HIV illness, and to do that, you've got to keep housing costs down, and you can't run your budget up to a million dollars before you can handle a million dollar budget. So the other cities right now are doing very different things. Some have focused on hospice. Some have focused on several other ways of going about housing. At Doorways we have focused on subsidies, public entitlements, housing authority, emergency payments, and a little bit of residential housing. So other cities have taken different approaches. John Hilgeman 22:50 And your number again is 454-9599. Lynn Cooper 22:55 That's right. John Hilgeman 22:55 Okay. So if anybody wants to call 454-9599. I was showing you an article before we went on the air about that. I just kind of wanted to draw attention to the people, the audience that the city council in Independence, Missouri has voted to exclude homosexuals, and why they continue to use homosexuals and not gay people I don't know, from protection against hate crimes, and the council voted five to two Monday not to retain the word sexual orientation in a law that would impose stiffer penalties for crimes committed out of hatred for certain social groups. There's going to be another council vote next month. I hope they rethink that, because the group that is most singled out for crimes according to statistics of the FBI and the Justice Department is gay people. So it's really strange. It's almost saying that gay people are less than human or don't have a right to protection. Another thing that I want to point out is that NBC is having a program Tuesday night. It's going to be at nine o'clock. This is Tuesday December the 18th, at nine o'clock, and it's in the Life Story series, and in the program D. W. Moffitt plays a TV anchor forced to publicly reveal that he is gay after he and his lover test HIV positive. And so some people have been wondering about this program. They know it was scheduled prior to this date and wasn't aired, but apparently they're going to be putting that show on on a monthly basis, the Life Series program. And another thing for people who are interested, there is also a meeting of Act Up on Tuesday, this Tuesday, December the 18th, at 730 at 5622 DelMar. That's 5622 DelMar, and Act Up is a group, of course, that's very much concerned about making changes in the way people with AIDS are treated, and they will target politicians, churches, organizations, a whole bunch of different groups to try to get things done. Lynn Cooper 25:13 They've already had some success with the Social Security office, and some other things, some other actions they've taken have gotten some good response for people with AIDS, that's been very helpful to us. John Hilgeman 25:25 I heard a very interesting action that they did recently. Unfortunately, they didn't get the publicity, which might have really focused attention on the problem. A group of people from ACT UP took a coffin down Market Street and took it into the rotunda at the city hall and set it in the middle of the rotunda at City Hall, and had all kinds of flyers there about the fact that the city of St Louis has no AIDS policy. Lynn Cooper 25:50 Yeah, yeah. And many of many companies and corporations have not yet thought to have an AIDS policy to protect their employees who may become infected. John Hilgeman 26:06 Is there anything else that you'd like to add, some other comments about Doorways, or about anything else we've got a couple more minutes. Lynn Cooper 26:14 Well, I suppose the most important thing, and the most important part of my job, is to keep Doorways going. And we have two new programs at this point. We're encouraging groups who think they can raise $10,000 to buy an apartment for someone with AIDS, and that group would, of course, receive a plaque, and they would be a plaque to them, and the new Doorways apartment that would be named after them. But the other one is a little bit more manageable for most of us, and that is that you can sponsor a person with AIDS in their housing for as little as $50 a month. Some of our clients, that's all they need to help them get by in safe, adequate housing. And so if someone wanted to sponsor a person with AIDS and make sure that they had safe, adequate housing, they could send us $50 a month, or a gift of any size to PO Box 4652, St Louis, 63108 that's doorways. PO Box 4652, 63108, and it's a season where people of all faiths are celebrating light and life. And if you can help doorways, or if you can help person with AIDS have a healthy home, we'd be grateful, John Hilgeman 27:26 so would they. And the AIDS Foundation is having a benefit. They're trying to raise some money, and the AIDS Foundation has been one of the groups that's been supportive of you. And this is Friday, December, the 21st, Friday of this week, from 8 until 1 am and this is going to take place at Twist. And if anybody's interested in that benefit, they can call 727-9181 that's 727-9181 and they can get more information about that benefit. And Transcribed by https://otter.ai