History

Our Beginnings

The AIDS Committee of London began in the spring of 1985 when several members of the gay and lesbian community in London mobilized to address the issues raised by HIV/AIDS in the city. Sponsored and housed by the Homophile Association of London Ontario (HALO), this group of volunteers identified two main areas of work to be done:

Providing emotional support and practical assistance to people living with HIV and their immediate family members; and

Providing education that would give people (mainly gay men) the information they needed to prevent HIV transmission and engender a more open and compassionate attitude in the larger community for those concerned about HIV/AIDS.

For the next couple of years, the AIDS Committee of London operated as a volunteer agency with no funding, based in, and supported by, HALO. The AIDS Committee provided education and support to people living with or concerned about HIV through its volunteers. During this time the group applied for and received corporate and charitable status as a non-profit, community-based group. It was also during these years that the AIDS Committee developed linkages with other AIDS service organizations from across the country and was a founding member of both the Ontario AIDS Network and the Canadian AIDS Society (umbrella organizations for community-based AIDS organizations).

At the end of 1987, the AIDS Committee of London received core funding from the Ontario Ministry of Health. This allowed us to hire staff for the first time, get an office that was accessible to the public, to co-ordinate and provide services in the community and to take on some of the larger issues raised by the growing HIV epidemic.

The Early Work

Much of the work in these earlier years continued to focus on providing support to people with HIV/AIDS and their family members (including chosen family) and prevention / education services to gay men.

There was also a strong emphasis on systemic advocacy - building more supportive environments and improving services for people living with or concerned about HIV/AIDS. This included:

• Developing linkages with, and doing training in, many of the local health and human service agencies to ensure that people with HIV/AIDS were getting appropriate services;
• Advocating for and helping to establish a specialized outpatient clinic in London for people with HIV/AIDS (the HIV Care Programme);
• Working for the legalization of anonymous HIV testing in the province and establishing a local anonymous testing site (Options Clinic);
• Identifying the need for and raising start-up funds for a hospice for people with AIDS (the John Gordon Home);
• Addressing issues of systemic oppression of gay/lesbian people that prevented (and still prevents) many people from being full and equal members of our society with the personal and social resources to address the issues raised by HIV/AIDS in their lives.

The Crisis Changes

As the AIDS Committee of London moved into the 1990's we began to address the issues that were being raised by the changing nature of the epidemic. Already, women, drug users, ' heterosexual men and people from different ethno-cultural backgrounds were getting HIV and, some of them were coming to ACOL for services. By the early 90's, AIDS was no longer a gay men's disease.

Women

The AIDS Committee began offering specialized services for women (The Women's HIV Resource Network), running a series of women's projects throughout the 90's with sporadic funding from various private sector grants. Coming Out of the Shadows: Women United Confronting AIDS, a women's caucus affiliated with the AIDS Committee of London in 1991-1992, produced an award-winning video, "Coming Out of the Shadows," articulating the experience of women infected or affected by HIV in South-Western Ontario. When funding was available, we hired women-specific counselors. We developed new linkages with services in the area that provided services to women and children.

Ethno-cultural populations

In the early 1990's, the AIDS Committee also began to address the needs of people from different ethno-cultural backgrounds regarding HIV. The four-year Communities Access Project, funded by Health Canada, was designed to build partnerships with culturally and linguistically diverse communities and organizations serving people living with disabilities in order to improve their access to appropriate education and support. New resources were developed for use within the AIDS Committee as well as for use by other agencies.

Drug / Needle Users

In 1992, the AIDS Committee of London established the Counterpoint Needle Exchange, a joint program with the Middlesex-London Health Unit. Over the course of the next ten years, Counterpoint grew to include several fixed site needle exchanges, street outreach services and a low-threshold methadone program. Again, new linkages and partnerships were developed in the community so that we could better serve the needs of people who use drugs and so that they could generally have better access to all services in the city.

What the 1990's taught us is that the AIDS epidemic keeps changing, and will continue to change - people from more and more "communities" are being infected with or affected by HIV. AIDS is no longer a "gay" disease; it is not an "injection drug users" disease. It is a disease that reaches across our society.

AIDS at the Margins of Society

What also became clear in the last decade is that AIDS has the most impact among people who are on the fringes of our society - people who don't have full access to the rights and services that many of us take for granted. This includes people living in or on the edge of poverty, women, street youth and other people who are street-identified, people from different ethno-cultural backgrounds (including aboriginal people), drug users and - still - people in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered community.

When someone's first concern is getting enough food to eat or a safe place to live; when they can't get information or services in a language or format that is meaningful to them and doesn't judge their actions or values; when they don't have the same legal and social rights as everyone else; or when they're actively discriminated against - then they don't have the personal resources and/or the social supports to enable them to either prevent HIV infection in the first place or, when infection occurs, to access the best level of HIV-specific services to maximize the length and quality of their lives.

The challenge today

The challenge for AIDS work - and the challenge for the AIDS Committee of London - in the years to come is to provide HIV-specific services that are relevant and accessible to everyone living with or concerned about HIV and to work towards a more just and compassionate society in which all people have equal rights and access to services.