BLAZER EVENTS - AIDS WALK 30th Anniversary Book by AZER CREATIVE TEAM

As some of you know, I joined Whitman-Walker Health ten years ago not really knowing that I was still searching for a way to honor my brother, Robert Blanchon. Robert died of AIDS-related complications in 1999. Not a day goes by here at Whitman-Walker when I do not think of him. I wish that he was here to see how my daughters-Ella and Josie--have grown into thoughtful, intelligent, and respectful young women. I wish he was here to remind me how handsome he was (he did that almost weekly with me!). I wish he was here so that we all could experience his creative force and voice in the arts. I wish he was here just to talk to and share the small moments of our daily lives. Needless to say, I miss my baby brother. One person. One relationship. One life changed forever. This is but one chapter in a book with thousands compiled over more than 30 years. It is a compelling story of loss, stigma, discrimination, compassion, love, advocacy, science and now hope for the end of HIV in our lifetime. Each one of you has a chapter to add to this living, breathing book. I invite you to share it with others today. When I look back over the images from the past 30 years, I am reminded of the importance of community in the life of Whitman-Walker Health. It was our community that first responded to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. It was our community that literally stood up to many forces in society and walked headlong into the breach. It was our community that demanded action from so many institutions in society at a time when fear and ignorance dominated the dialogue about AIDS. And it is our community that will lead the way to ending HIV in our lifetime. Until that time, our community will lace up their sneakers to walk and run to honor the memories of family, friends, and colleagues they lost, to fight for those persons living with HIV, and to advocate for new prevention tools. Thank you so much for your time and generosity in support of the 30th Walk to End HIV. Yours in service, Don

D.C. AIDS Walk marks 30th anniversary Iconic event hailed for changing attitudes, raising money

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In 2014, it was renamed the Walk and 5K to End HIV. But on Nov. 12 of this year, when participants assemble at Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington to begin their walk or run as part of Whitman-Walker Health’s annual fundraising event, it will mark the 30th anniversary of what began in 1986 as the AIDS Walk Washington. Current and former WhitmanWalker officials involved in the walk and 5K run during some or all of those 30 years say that while the event began primarily as a fundraiser it quickly evolved into something more than that. “As much as we spend time trying to raise money for important programs – for education, prevention and treatment – I think the most important contribution that comes out of the walk is the level of community engagement and response,” said Don Blanchon, Whitman-Walker Health’s current executive director. “You’re talking 5,000 to 10,000 people a year walking, running, participating,” he said, noting that the event has motivated many participants to remain involved throughout the year in HIV/AIDS related programs and educational efforts in their neighborhoods, schools, or workplaces. “And yes, we raise the money and yes it supports our programs,” Blanchon said. “But it’s really this notion of the more people we can get engaged in the fight against HIV the

sooner we’ll get to ending HIV in D.C.” Former D.C. Council member and longtime gay rights advocate Jim Graham is credited with starting the AIDS Walk in D.C. in 1986 during his tenure as Whitman-Walker’s executive director, which lasted from 1984 to 1999. Graham said that at his suggestion, Whitman-Walker and the then-Human Rights Campaign Fund, which is now the Human Rights Campaign, organized and sponsored the D.C. AIDS Walk jointly during its first few years. “They were our partners,” Graham said. “And the reason we partnered with them is I was concerned that we wouldn’t have the money for the upfront costs,” he said. “The financial risk was very considerable at that time.” He said to some degree he modeled the D.C. walk after AIDS Walks in New York and Los Angeles, which began a short time earlier at a time that Graham and AIDS activists refer to as the “dark days” of the AIDS epidemic. Graham and Patricia Hawkins, who became involved with WhitmanWalker in 1983 as a volunteer and later became deputy executive director, point out that the first D.C. AIDS Walk came at a time when there was no effective treatment for people with HIV/AIDS. Nearly everyone in the LGBT community knew people who had died of AIDS or were ill from the disease, the two said.

“It was a very hard period of time emotionally,” said Graham. “People walked with those they loved and those who were still alive,” he said. “And that made it a very emotional walk as well because you had people directly engaged with people who had HIV and who had various ailments related to that.” Hawkins said it was especially moving to see people with AIDS participating in the walk in wheel chairs who were assisted by friends and family members. During one of the early years, the walk passed next to George Washington University Hospital, Hawkins said. “Some of the AIDS patients watched from the windows of their hospital rooms,” she said, with several of them hanging panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt outside the window. “So many of the people were dying,” said Hawkins. “They would not be there the next year. So it meant so much that so many people were walking for them.” According to Hawkins, a psychotherapist, the unwavering support for people with HIV and AIDS by the 600 to 800 AIDS Walk participants in the early years of the walk was uplifting and inspirational. But she said fear and misunderstanding about AIDS and how it was transmitted remained widespread in the community as a whole at that time. Around that time, she noted, Whitman-Walker filed a discrimination

WASHINGTON BLADE FILE photo by henry lisner

‘The most important contribution that comes out of the walk is the level of community engagement and response,’ said Don Blanchon, WhitmanWalker Health’s executive director.

lawsuit against Howard University Hospital after reports surfaced that cafeteria workers and some nurses refused to bring trays with food for AIDS patients into their hospital rooms. “There was still widespread fear about how AIDS could be contracted,” she said. “So the first walk was mostly a gay event. And there was concern that walkers would be heckled.” Fortunately, Hawkins said, she was unaware of any heckling of participants of the first walk, which ended on the National Mall near the Washington Monument. “But that was the atmosphere,” she said. “And the AIDS Walk helped change that. There’s no question in my mind about that because after that first AIDS Walk we began to have more people who were more aware of what was happening with AIDS and they began to understand it.” Graham said Whitman-Walker and Human Rights Campaign Fund officials chose to end the first walk on the National Mall as a symbolic gesture to prod the federal government to do more at a time when little or no federal funds or programs were addressing the AIDS epidemic. “There was a great deal of collaboration in the early years with the Human Rights Campaign Fund and Whitman-Walker,” said Hilary Rosen, a longtime LGBT rights advocate and former HRCF official. Rosen noted that while WhitmanWalker provided services for people with HIV/AIDS, HRCF pushed on Capitol

Hill for the government to provide more funding for those services and for AIDSrelated research. “It’s hard to describe the desperation we felt in those days,” Rosen said. “The AIDS Walk was a way to get the whole community engaged in something productive when much of our work felt hopeless.” Graham said that over the next decade the D.C. AIDS Walk grew significantly and became one of Whitman-Walker’s primary sources of funding through the late 1990s. Starting with a net return of about $150,000 a year in the first few years, Graham said the AIDS Walk peaked in 1997, with a net return of about $2.3 million. He said the walk was bolstered in the 1990s with support from celebrities and well-known public officials, including Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper Gore, who made appearances at the rallies that took place where the walk ended, as well as then-U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. It clearly had broadened from its start as a gay event to an event that drew widespread support from the community at large, including the city’s large African-American community. Graham and Whitman-Walker psychotherapist and counseling program official Joe Izzo said the AIDS Walk traveled over different routes during the its 30-year history, with at least two being viewed as a flop. One year, Izzo said, the entire walk took place inside Rock Creek Park, drawing far fewer participants and spectators than usual. Hawkins said another year the walk was split into multiple smaller walks

WASHINGTON BLADE FILE photo by jeff surprenant

Former D.C. Council member and longtime gay rights advocate Jim Graham is credited with starting the AIDS Walk in D.C. in 1986.

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that began in areas throughout the city as well as in suburban Maryland and Virginia. Similar to the Rock Creek walk, far fewer people participated, and less money than usual was raised. Neither of those two routes was repeated. Izzo said he has participated in every D.C. AIDS Walk since the event began in 1986. He said the walk experienced a gradual decline in participants and money raised in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, mostly, he said, because medical advances in HIV/AIDS treatment put an end to AIDS as a terminal illness. “By the late ‘90s and 2000s the protease inhibitors were working and people were living,” he said. “We weren’t going to funerals. After 1997, ’98 that made a huge difference even in terms of visibility of HIV/AIDS and people’s concern about it,” Izzo said. “So it didn’t seem to be as urgent, and our numbers trailed off.” Izzo said the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington, which took place Sept. 11, 2001, had a devastating impact on Whitman-Walker’s 2001 AIDS Walk, which took place one month later. “We had maybe 2,500 to 3,000 people that showed up,” he said, compared to the 38,000 that participated in the peak years of the late 1990s. “People were scared. It was on the Mall and people were very skittish. I remember being there and worrying every time a plane went overhead like is this

going to be another attack?” Graham, who left his job as executive director in January 1999 after winning election to the City Council in 1998, has praised Blanchon for successfully transforming Whitman-Walker’s funding streams to make it less reliant on private donations and large fundraising events such as the AIDS Walk. Upon becoming executive director in 2006, Blanchon changed Whitman-Walker’s organizational and funding structure from a community clinic to a community health care center capable of obtaining reimbursement for patient care through Medicaid, Medicare, and private health insurance coverage. He has been credited with stabilizing Whitman-Walker’s finances, bringing it to a secure place where it has expanded its programs despite the drop-off in revenue from large events like the AIDS Walk “When I got here we were kind of in the ranges of $600,000 to $800,000 in gross funding dollars” generated by the AIDS walks, Blanchon said. He said the overhead cost was about $150,000, resulting in net revenue of $450,000 to $650,000. “And the last couple of years – again in the $600,000 to $800,000 [gross revenue] range – what we tried to do again is think more about the importance of awareness and advocacy and community engagement and how do we get

more people involved in the event,” Blanchon said.“So as opposed to being the primary source of funding for all of our HIV care, which it was when Jim was here, now it’s in effect a really important discretionary element,” he said. “It’s the money we use to keep people engaged. And that largely requires us to have staff that does a lot of outreach work to the community.” Among other things, Blanchon said, those staff members “have to be in homes and they have to be in clubs and they have to be at health fairs and they have to be on the phone making sure people are taking their medication. And not everything like that is covered by government.” Blanchon said WhitmanWalker decided to schedule this year’s 30th anniversary Walk & 5K to End HIV on Nov. 12 instead of the middle of October, when it’s been held for at least the past 15 years, to avoid potential conflicts with the presidential election. “We did not want to be in competition with election fundraisers,” he said. Izzo said among the activities planned for the ceremony following the Nov. 12 Walk and Run to End HIV, which will take place at Freedom Plaza, will be the display of a special commemorative 30th anniversary AIDS Walk quilt. He said the quilt, which was made by master quilter Gail Newman, consists of as many as 30 AIDS Walk T-shirts worn mostly by him and a few other D.C. AIDS Walk participants over the past 30 years.

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