BEBASHI, America’s First Black ASO, Turns Twenty this Year with No Education Funding—Tapping Creativity to Reach Philadelphia’s Urban Communities

by Suzy Martin

A week before Live 8 and Elton John’s concert against HIV/AIDS shined an international spotlight on the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps, Philly’s own spoken-word and soul music scenesters took their sound to the same Rocky steps for BEBASHI, a local AIDS agency. Between barbecue dinner and a late-night dance party with spontaneous breakdancing and capoeira under city lights and starlight, young hip-hop heads and elegantly clad clubgoers

got tested for HIV, asked counselors about its risks, and picked up free condoms.

And BEBASHI, the nation’s first African-American AIDS service organization, began celebrating its twentieth anniversary.

Founded in 1985 by a handful of street-outreach volunteers, Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues, now called BEBASHI–Transition to Hope, serves people of all colors living with HIV. But the “E”—Educating—is still essential. “Organizations call us to do AIDS 101 in health fairs, schools, rehabs, and churches,” says Antonio Adolphues, assistant prevention director. Yet in its anniversary year, BEBASHI has no outreach or education money. “We still try to do as many as we can, but the funding is nonexistent,” he notes.

Let Them Eat Abstinence

At a time when the brutal statistics of HIV’s attack on African-Americans have crept into the most conservative politicians’ speeches, one might expect more outreach into that community. With only thirteen percent of the U.S. population, blacks account for forty-seven percent of Americans with HIV. That jumps to nearly seventy-five percent when you’re talking about girls thirteen to nineteen. And in a new five-city study, almost half of black men who have sex with men were positive.

Some say the money is flowing—just not to sex-positive education efforts originated by the AIDS community. In the heat of 2004’s election-year summer, President Bush visited Philadelphia to talk about HIV/AIDS, announcing new global and domestic initiatives—among them, doubling federal funding for abstinence-only programs across the country. He spoke at Greater Exodus Baptist Church, whose pastor, Rev. Herbert Lusk II, controversially endorsed Bush from the pulpit in 2000 and received a $1 million faith-based grant for his job-training nonprofit in 2002.

Greater Exodus lies six blocks from BEBASHI in mostly black North Philadelphia, but “AIDS service organizations like us were not notified at all,” says Gary Bell, BEBASHI’s executive director. “It was like a stealth speech.”

Ron Simmons, president and CEO of Us Helping Us, a Washington, D.C., AIDS agency for black gay and bisexual men, says, “Faith-based organizations that don’t advocate birth control are more in line with Bush—not ASOs that serve minorities, gay men, and drug users. I wouldn’t be surprised if ASOs get cut out more and more.”

Simmons also mentions a Bush proposal to narrow services for people living with HIV—cutting out such “extras” as food banks and support groups to focus on clinical care. “How many Black ASOs have clinics?” he asks. BEBASHI has already scaled back services for positives. Gladys Gutierrez, forty-five, got her apartment through BEBASHI, where she also goes for case management and a women’s support group, but she can’t get food vouchers there anymore. “It would be nice if they get the funding, because there are some girls who really need it more than I do,” she says.

The federal government grants roughly $200 million yearly to programs that urge teens to say no to sex. Aside from the confusion that “wait until you’re legally married” could raise for LGBT youth, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) cites six state evaluations finding abstinence-only initiatives ineffective. In fact, a 2001 study showed that teens who took virginity pledges were one-third less likely to practice safe sex once they broke their vow.

“When my friends and I were growing up,” says Joni Bishop, BEBASHI’s twenty-something director of development, “we were giggling at someone putting a condom on a banana. When we lost our virginity, we did it with a condom. And young girls today aren’t.”

According to Adolphues, sometimes the organization can’t afford to give out condoms or even have literature printed. “It breaks our hearts to say no,” Bishop adds. “And when you look at the different types of condoms, dental dams, lubricants—that’s a marketing issue, because you want to make safe sex attractive. We can only get one type of male condom and one type of female condom.”

Dropping Some Science

The CDC grants $412 million yearly to cities, states and community organizations for HIV prevention—barely twice what the feds give to abstinence-only groups. But while “HIV prevention money is drying up,” as Dorena Kearney, executive director of COLOURS, Philadelphia’s center for LGBT people of color, puts it, she and other heads of ASOs in communities of color describe more complex funding issues too. 

In 2003, the CDC began prioritizing HIV testing and prevention with HIV-positive people. With new infections steadily at 40,000 a year, redirecting limited funds sounded like good sense. But scientists from the nonprofit Rand Corp. say the new direction is a dead end—estimating that if current funding went only to programs the new strategy favors, only about 7,300 infections could be prevented annually. Potentially 20,800 could be prevented by more cost-effective programs, including community mobilization for men who have sex with men, needle exchange, and explicit mass media campaigns, and condoms for tens of millions of people.

“We already fund all the interventions they’re saying we should,” Rob Janssen, MD, the CDC’s HIV/AIDS prevention director, responds. “It may be a small scale compared to what they want. But testing positive has a bigger impact on reducing risk behavior than interventions among people at risk of becoming infected.”

Bell says the concerns of BEBASHI as well as other providers are often ignored. “People are talking about, ‘Now you’re going to be doing rapid testing in crackhouses,’—and you know that ain’t going to work. People on the front lines, doing this every day, need to be part of that discussion.”

For both Adolphues and the Rand researchers, the key to testing as a prevention tool is to combine it with client-centered counseling, which Adolphues points out would be impossible in a crackhouse. “Testing in itself is not an education,” he says.

Shifting Targets

San Francisco’s Black Coalition on AIDS (BCA), celebrating its own twentieth anniversary next year, has a similar mission to BEBASHI’s—culturally sensitive HIV education and services. With the help of San Francisco’s health department, foundations and CDC grants, BCA has more than doubled its HIV prevention funding, says director of development Gil Gerald. “When the CDC shifted strategies, we strategically went after those resources,” he says, although prevention with positives “does shift more resources to clinical settings.”

And prevention with negatives? The CDC shifted that around, too, says Mark McLaurin, the New York AIDS Coalition’s director of federal affairs. “The CDC cancelled the interventions community groups developed on their own, that our experience in the field tells us are very effective,” he says. “Community-based organizations are forced to choose from a package of about twelve programs—only one of which is for black MSMs, none of which are sexually explicit, none of which use the languages the high-risk populations they’re trying to reach use and understand. Organizations that applied to do other things weren’t funded.”

Adolphues agrees: “BEBASHI’s very strong in culturally sensitive information. Today, everyone does the same thing. And I think that dampens our personality.” McLaurin says this feeling is national. “I fly all over, from California to New Hampshire. I’ve talked with the prevention directors, and they know this is not the most effective way to do HIV prevention in this country.”

Bell warns that people not designated “at-risk” could believe myths that HIV doesn’t affect them: “A woman came in who was fifty-one, she tested positive, and she was really crying. I couldn’t help thinking we may have been able to reach her in the past at a health fair, maybe her workplace—but now, we’re waiting for them to come in and get tested. She didn’t think she was at risk.”

Dancing in the Streets

One thing about the cash crunch, it’s pushed BEBASHI to go further with less—and creatively. “Every Monday, Gary comes in and says, ‘I’ve got ideas!’” Bishop laughs. With a donor’s help, they gave free Temptations tickets to older adults who got tested for HIV. Every year there’s Dancing in the Streets, at the Art Museum steps.

“That was sort of Joni’s baby,” Bell says. “We don’t have money to go into classrooms anymore. And they won’t come to you if you say ‘HIV.’ You’ve got to say ‘Dancing in the Streets’!”

“For Thanksgiving 2002,” Bishop says, “we partnered with Mount Carmel Baptist Church in West Philadelphia, in the zip code with the highest AIDS cases. We hired a caterer for over 500 people—ex-offenders, low-income, or homeless—and had HIV testing, a health fair, and job fair.” In 2003 BEBASHI created posters for the public schools reading, “We’ve come too far to die of AIDS,” above images recalling slavery and Jim Crow.

And a generation remembers the lessons BEBASHI still shares. “We raised good money with a sports raffle,” Bishop says. “I asked Ruben Harley from Mitchell & Ness, who make authentic ‘throwback’ jerseys, for an autographed Donovan McNabb jersey, and do you know the first thing he said? ‘BEBASHI used to come and do education when I went to West Philly High.’ We’ve been around so long that people know us and the good work we’ve done.”

For tickets to BEBASHI’s 20th anniversary gala on November 22, honoring Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie, Helena Kwakwa, MD, and state Senator Vincent Hughes, log on to the organization’s Web site at www.bebashi.org or call (215) 769-3561.

Suzy Martin is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer whose work appears in AIDS Treatment News and POZ. Contact her by e-mail at lasuzy@earthlink.net.

October 2005