The Centers for Disease Control released the list of grant recipients of a newly created HIV-prevention funding opportunity, which will benefit five Pennsylvania agencies.
The $42-million funding stream will benefit 133 agencies nationwide, including The Philadelphia AIDS Consortium, Mazzoni Center, Family Planning Council and Public Health Management Corporation, as well as AIDS Care Group in Chester.
The new grant program folded several former multi-year funding cycles that were nearing completion into one and seeks to expand prevention efforts among the hardest-hit populations.
“This funding is a critical part of CDC’s national HIV prevention efforts and is in line with the priorities identified in the recently released National HIV/AIDS Strategy,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. “Governments on the federal and state levels cannot end this epidemic alone, and these resources will help to give many communities the tools they need to fight HIV locally.”
HIV/AIDS service organizations were eligible for funding from the program’s Category A, which targets ethnic and racial minorities, or Category B, which focuses on members of high-risk groups, like men who have sex with men (MSM).
Ron Powers, Mazzoni director of programming, said the health facility has received HIV prevention monies from the CDC in some form or another since 2000, and will put this new $337,248 annual grant toward continuing three of its intervention projects: HIV counseling, testing and referral services for MSM of color, for which it collaborates with Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative; comprehensive risk-counseling services for HIV-positive or high-risk men to cut down on the risk of future transmission or infection; and its community-outreach program Get Real.
Get Real tells the real stories of local men — such as their coming-out experiences or their challenges living with HIV — as a way to promote public discussions about sexual health and HIV prevention and is a joint project of Mazzoni and PHMC, which has provided the research resources for the program.
Powers explained that Get Real’s five-year funding was coming to a close around the same time the new CDC funding opportunity opened, so Mazzoni decided to request for the continuation of the program under the new grant.
Akil Pierre, project coordinator of PHMC’s Preventing AIDS Through Live Movement and Sound, served as the lead organizer of his agency’s CDC proposal, the first major federal request Pierre has spearheaded. He said the lengthy application process was nerve-wracking, as was the site visit from CDC officials, which were granted to the top-ranking agencies vying for the money.
PHMC was awarded just over $300,000 annually from the Category A funds, which it will use for two new programs.
The Sisters Informing Healing Living Empowering program aims to reduce HIV infections among African-American teen girls through group sessions that seek to heighten gender and cultural pride while concurrently raising awareness about effective HIV prevention. SIHLE participants will also receive free counseling, testing and referral services.
PHMC is also launching a bi-monthly stand-alone counseling and testing event called Young Sisters in Charge, which also targets young African-American women.
“We’re going to be working with a very vulnerable population here, adolescent young females who are sexually active,” Pierre said. “The CDC has stated that this group is at an increased risk for HIV infection and there’s really no other agency in the city of Philadelphia that is specifically targeting African-American females. This is going to be dead-on with PHMC’s mission because we try to improve the health of the community by research and by outreach and we’re going to be right there in the trenches with these young ladies.”
Both PHMC programs are expected to begin in February.
AIDS Care Group is also planning to launch a series of new programs with its $363,000 Category B annual award.
Executive director Dr. Howell Strauss said the agency will use the money to offer HIV-prevention resources and testing at the Bucks County Jail, the Probation and Parole Office of Delaware County, the emergency room at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital and at its Sharon Hill Medical Center location.
Action AIDS was one of several local groups that applied for the funding and wasn’t chosen, but Kevin Burns, Action AIDS executive director took it in stride.
“We were hoping to expand our prevention and education programs because right now we have one team that does that and we were hoping that, if we’d gotten the funding, we would have been able to bring on a whole second team,” he said. “So it was disappointing, but at least it was new money. It’s better for it to be new money and not something continuing that we’d lost.”
Many CDC grants are dispersed to community organizations through local health agencies, like Philadelphia’s AIDS Activities Coordinating Office, but this funding is given directly to the groups from CDC, which Powers noted can safeguard against situations like last year’s state-budget crisis, which halted the delivery of some federal, state and city funds.
“This is essential not only for Mazzoni Center but for Philadelphia as a whole, in terms of keeping these resources here in Philadelphia for prevention efforts,” he said. “The city gets funding from the CDC or from the state but, as we know, the state can cut funds occasionally, so it’s good to have a separate revenue where agencies can be funded directly.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].