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experimental and alternative treatments, community based clinical research, minority education
and treatment, adolescent outreach and prevention, AIDS treatment and care for women, and,
touching on all of these, an empowerment movement for people with HIV/AIDS. Although this
period was marked by increasing specialization, it was also characterized by considerable
overlaps of function and constituency, as well as a high degree of overlapping membership. The
processes by which new concerns and new constituents were defined for community based AIDS
work were also the processes through which new organizational spaces were defined within the
network, and, correspondingly, new interorganizational relations came into being.
Additional points of contact occurred where two NPOs serving different constituencies,
adopting different tactics, or pursuing distinct goals discover an overlap of their interests. The
Minority Task Force on AIDS (MTFA), for example, included in its mission counseling and
education on healthy living with HIV. For current and reliable nutritional information they drew
upon God’s Love, We Deliver. GLWD itself had begun as a very small operation in the
Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea. As the demographics of the disease changed, and as
HIV/AIDS became more of a chronic condition requiring ongoing support, GLWD’s mission
also grew. Expansion brought them out of Chelsea as far as the Bronx and Brooklyn, and into the
political domain of services to underserved minority communities, and hence, into contact with
organizations such as MTFA. Such collaborations and exchanges worked because each
recognized the other as a part of the same process and the same community.
The networked community defined the HIV/AIDS agenda for the city and most of the
nation. They demonstrated needs, improvised responses, documented successes, and, ultimately,
convinced the federal government to support what they were doing. How could they have
Convention