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Organizations lack capital.
Recently, I was interviewed by The Chicago Reporter on the challenges facing black HIV/AIDS organizations when it comes to funding, sustainability and effectiveness. I just read the published product, "Cocktail for Disaster" from the January/February 2009 issue, which was disappointing to me.
As an African American of Caribbean (Suriname) descent, I have had the privilege of working in numerous communities of color as a public health expert. The challenges described in the article do not adequately address the real issue, which is that black organizations, from the inception of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, have not had the social capital seen in the gay community in order to effectively provide services for their constituents.
Due to this lack of social capital, African-American HIV/AIDS organizations were left out of the picture with no place at the table when policies were implemented that mostly addressed gay communities. After the Reagan era, politicians began recognizing that African Americans were actually suffering and had been in greater amounts; we had missed the boat. When programs were installed during the early Clinton years, those programs were simply "adapted" from those designed for gay communities and therefore were not very effective in African-American communities considering that one shoe does not fit all.
African-American advocates had already begun to create programs, which did not receive the kind of funding needed to sustain them because of the ignorance of our government to recognize that we were sinking into a deep epidemic--one that we will never [bring] ourselves out of. Due to the fact that many gay organizations have been at the table for years and continue to treat the epidemic as an entitlement for them to stay in control of any programs and policies, we have lacked to address the true causes of HIV in the African-American community: lack of social capital and social determinants that do not apply to gay communities.
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Source: HighBeam Research, Organizations lack capital.