National Minority AIDS Council Building Healthier Communities

By 1989, the number of AIDS cases in the United States reaches 100,000, and the need for NMAC is clearer than ever. Unfortunately, the agency is still having trouble finding direction and, worse, was operating on a deficit.  

 

The Health Omnibus Programs Extension of 1988 becomes law. It includes a number of HIV/AIDS-related provisions and authorizes the CDC to directly fund community-based organizations delivering HIV/AIDS services to populations and geographic areas hardest hit and at highest risk for HIV/infection.

 

HRSA increases the number of state HIV care and treatment programs with its House and Community Based Care state grant initiatives.

 

During the Office of Minority Health's (OMH) second national AIDS conference that August, NMAC selects Paul Kawata, former head of the National AIDS Network (1985-1989) as its second Executive Director. He originally is assigned to dismantle the organization; however, he and others felt it important to keep NMAC open. On his first day, he laid off half the staff, and wrote a personal check for $5,000 to cover the next payroll.

 

Kawata makes major programmatic changes at NMAC, refocusing the agency's mission from raising awareness around HIV in communities of color to providing minority HIV/AIDS organizations in communities of color technical assistance and capacity building services. Since many of these organizations were having difficulty administering their federal grants, much of NMAC's first organizational development programs, and its first three regional trainings, focused on fiscal management and fundraising.

 

Later that year, NMAC receives its first grant from the OMH to create a resource library of AIDS in communities of color, focusing on African American gay men.

 

The new agency also is asked by the CDC to prepare the opening for its Minority AIDS Conference. Sandra McDonald, one of NMAC's founding members, recalls:

It was one of the first times that anyone got up and did this amazing multiculture presentation about the way AIDS affected all communities of color. And it was one of the first times that all these people who had come there separately really got to know each other and to understand the importance of what NMAC was about.

 

Other highlights at this time included NMAC's participation in the First International Conference of AIDS-Related Community and Non-Government Organizations, during which the agency commits to sponsoring the second conference in Paris in 1990. 
 

Archbishiop Carl Bean, one of NMAC’s founding members, establishes the Unity Fellowship Church under the doctrine of Liberation Theology, and the Minority AIDS Project (MAP) in Los Angeles, CA.

 

The CDC and HRSA jointly award $11 million to seven community health centers nationwide under an initiative that would become the basis for Title II of the Ryan White CARE Act.  

 

In the US, 28,054 people die of AIDS and another 43,499 people are diagnosed with the disease. Photographer Roger Mapplethorpe; dancer Alvin Ailey; and Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell all died of AIDS. The media also chronicled the death of eight-year old Elizabeth Martinez, whose mother had appealed a school decision that required the girl to sit in a glass cage during class.

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