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most of its participants working in other NPOs, and its mission divided among so many
concentrated efforts, The New York AIDS Network voted to dissolve.
The AIDS Resource Center (ARC) began operations in the Greenwich Village area in
1983, with a focus on counseling and temporary shelter. ARC brought together “business owners,
gay activists, and clergy to provide housing plus practical, emotional and spiritual support to the
growing number of homeless people with AIDS (PWAs) living on the streets of New York City”
(ARC n.d.). The group’s founder, Reverend Lee Hancock, worked from the Judson Memorial
Baptist Church, but ARC was a neighborhood project. ARC’s community was defined
geographically, in the model of a parish community, but mostly included low-income or
homeless people of color, including many drug users. The Haitian Coalition on AIDS (HCA)
formed in 1983 as an offshoot of the Haitian Centers Council (HCC, founded in 1982) in
Brooklyn, which already had a defined constituency and a working model of community-based
social support. They provided Creole and French education material, service coordination, and,
later, legal advocacy to Haitian residents affected by HIV/AIDS, although the organization had
“no boundaries
…
no one agenda.” HCA was only partially a response to the relatively high
incidence rates among Haitians in New York. The direct trigger was the listing by the CDC of
Haitian as an AIDS risk group, and the subsequent wave of anti-Caribbean violence and
discrimination.
Lastly, Health Education AIDS Liaison (HEAL) was, according to its mission statement
“founded in 1982 with the purpose of providing information, hope and support regarding natural
ways of healing through alternative, holistic and non-toxic therapies.” Informants there rephrased
their goal as “disempowering the whitecoats,” by which they referred not only to those who
Convention