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community” discourse and significantly altered the course of community organizing.
The Growth of the AIDS Community, 1984-1986
By 1984, the epidemic had grown, but the political context remained essentially
unchanged. Several new organizations had formed, and additional communities had mobilized.
Health officials had settled on a name for AIDS – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – and
several of the informally constituted community efforts incorporated as new CBOs with “AIDS”
in their names. The major news media had published a few stories, though usually not the stories
that the community would have wanted. For the organized community, the issue of the moment
was marginalization. Community-building efforts began to converge on questions of exclusion,
and from there, empowerment.
Gradually the new caregiving roles became a routine part of life within certain quarters of
the city, and became correspondingly more organized. Three innovative organizations, God’s
Love, We Deliver (GLWD), The Momentum Project, and Bailey House, incorporated in 1985 to
provide daily living assistance to people with HIV/AIDS. GLWD began with two people in one
apartment, following a period of volunteer work by the group’s founder, Ganga Stone. Stone
took on responsibility for a few people in late stages of HIV disease, unable to care for
themselves, and scheduled their friends to bring them meals every day. Once organized, GLWD
contacted local restaurants, many of them three and four star venues, and convinced them to
donate food, which volunteers then delivered on foot and bicycle to a growing list of homebound
people with HIV/AIDS. Within its first year, GLWD mobilized hundreds of volunteers for
relatively manageable, non-political tasks. More significantly, they reached a different pool of
Convention