Hispanic Help

Hispanic AIDS Forum volunteers work at a street fair to encourage HIV testing.

Using Guerilla Tactics To Fight AIDS

By Matt Hampton

For more than 20 years, the Hispanic AIDS Forum has been dedicated to the health and well-being of both the Hispanic population in New York City in general and those who are HIV positive, or at risk in particular.

The organization, founded in 1985, currently has three branches in New York City, all of them located in areas where the population has a high risk of contracting HIV.

The three branches, located in Manhattan, the South Bronx and Western Queens, each have their own individual events and support groups, tailored to the community in which they are located. As well, each group also feeds into the larger organization, hosting citywide events that allow for a strongly coordinated outreach program.

“The three separate offices are a response to HIV prevalence in those areas,” said Noris Chavarria an institutional outreach and marketing specialist for the Hispanic AIDS Forum. “They do cater to the specific populations in each area. Queens, for instance, has a TransLatina outreach program for the large transgender community.”

According to Chavarria, the outreach programs, both in the form of HIV testing and HIV prevention, are the real backbone of the Hispanic AIDS Forum. The group also has programs that allow HIV positive community members to file for rent assistance, and support groups that have long-standing histories of community enrichment. It is programs like these, Chavarria said, that truly establish the HAF as a major player in the health outreach community.

Helping Queens

In Queens itself, the Woodside offices of the HAF are a more recent development. After several years in a well-established Jackson Heights office, the group was forced to uproot and move due to a disagreement with the landlord. It is currently the subject of a pending civil liberties suit in the New York State Supreme Court. That however, does not change the fact that the Queens contingent of the HAF was forced to move to Woodside more than 6 years ago.

“We’ve had a very good relationship with the neighbors here; everybody’s very welcoming and they’re fine with our clients,” said George Fesser of the Queens HAF office. “It’s taken a while to establish that we’re here now. We’re very conveniently located; it’s very easy to get here and we haven’t had any significant barriers, though when we left Jackson Heights people thought we had closed. It’s been a long process getting us back to where we are today.”

Currently, the Woodside office of the HAF offers a staggering array of services for the Queens community, including several programs that will coincide with the upcoming Pride Week, June 17-24, in New York City.

Attacking Hot Spots

According to Fesser, the Elmhurst and Corona areas have the most significant HIV risks, as well as portions of Jackson Heights and Western Queens. Because of these high risk “hot spots,” the Hispanic AIDS Forum has high-intensity advertising campaigns, along with postering and treatment services that they offer to people that happen to walk by that live in the area. This guerilla-style type of testing gives the HAF a good opportunity to enlighten people in the community who otherwise might not have access, either through a family doctor or hospital visit, with HIV testing options.

George Fesser inside the Woodside offices of the Hispanic AIDS Forum.

“We promote HIV testing very aggressively in those areas. We’ll go out and canvas a couple of blocks and hit every single store on the block, with posters in shop windows. Then we start parking on those blocks, with mobile testing units and directing people to mobile community testing stations,” Fesser said. “If somebody comes back with a positive test, we immediately hook them up with Elmhurst Hospital so we hook them up with services that they need from us and we take it from there.”

According to Fesser, the national average for testing of this type in high-risk areas is a positive test nearly 4 percent of the time.

“The important thing,” he said, “is to help people find out what their status is.”

Timed With Pride

With Pride Week coming up, Fesser said that the next week is the most important of the year both citywide, and in Queens, as groups of all stripe come out to support their neighbors and friends in the gay community.

“This is our biggest [event] because we see everyone at once; most of our services are LGBT focused. It’s the day where we meet everyone in the neighborhood. Former clients, current clients, future clients, they’re all in the same place at one time,” Fesser said.

The most important element of the upcoming week is obviously the free HIV testing, and the Hispanic AIDS Forum does it as efficiently and quickly as anyone.

The tests are “rapid result” style tests, which mean that an oral swab is used to take a bloodless sample, and results can be obtained in about 20 minutes. This way, the HAF can quickly get people in neighborhoods the counseling and medical attention they need on the spot, without having to track down test patients after the fact. Last year, in the New York City area alone, the Hispanic AIDS Forum tested more than 2,300 people, regardless of race, age, or sexual orientation. Because of these tests, the forum is able to help people into counseling, or direct them towards safer sex practices to prevent transmission of HIV.

In Queens in particular, Fesser also said that the Hispanic AIDS Forum reaches out to young people, in the hopes that teaching prevention and safe sex practices takes hold at a time when young people often have to make difficult decisions. With that in mind, the HAF also trains young people to educate peers and reach out to the community that way.

“It depends on the event and who we’re working with,” Fesser said. “Obviously, we’re not going to be sending 17-year-olds to pass out condoms at bars.”

Fesser said that the most important facet of the Hispanic AIDS Forum is its ability to reach into the community at large and raise awareness, however possible.