ASIAC, which has provided HIV/AIDS services to the Asian and Pacific-Islander communities for nearly 20 years, announced this week that it will close its doors.
ASIAC, formerly known as AIDS Services in Asian Communities, will begin the “orderly closing” of operations, effectively immediately. The board of the agency voted for the closure at its March 13 meeting, citing financial reasons.
Executive director Kevin Huang said the shutdown will be rolled out strategically as the organization seeks to preserve some of its programs through other entities and connect staffers who have specialties in certain languages with other HIV/AIDS groups.
ASIAC was founded in 1995 by Richard Liu to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate HIV/AIDS services, including prevention, education, testing, counseling and case management.
Board chair Luis Lim noted that the board has been effective in encouraging mainstream and LGBT health-care organizations to be more inclusive of the API community — and to educate API populations on LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities.
“Although a chapter will end for Philadelphia’s Asian and Pacific Islander community, much has been accomplished by ASIAC with the help of our program partners, collaborators, funders and volunteers,” Lim said.
The agency most recently had more than 60 active volunteers. It was operating with a staff of 10, including four paid staffers, three paid interns and three interns working for college credit.
The organization’s most recent annual budget that started in July was about $250,000, which Huang said was comprised of Part A federal funding from the Ryan White Program, state funding for its HIV testing program and about 15-20 percent from private grants.
Huang said the agency provided direct client services to about 400 people per year and worked with several hundred more on cultural competency and linguistic access, as well as undertook outreach campaigns that reached thousands each year.
Lim said that, in recent years, there have been fewer prevention and outreach dollars available, and private funders have been trending towards agencies that provide more direct care. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act, which seeks to make HIV testing more routine, has also alleviated the need for some of ASIAC’s services, he said.
Huang said ASIAC played a major role in ensuring its constituent communities were included in data-reporting efforts at the federal level, as well as in developing guidelines for cultural-competency and linguistic-access standards from the Office of Minority Health.
“One of the reasons that this is the appropriate time to close is because we have these laws in place now,” Huang said. “Now, it’s about enforcing those laws and making sure everyone in the system complies with those laws. Now, we need everyone to be part of the solution and remain conscious that Asians too are at risk for HIV.”
The agency traces its roots to a conversation Liu had with a group of friends in his living room in the mid-1990s.
“We saw how the HIV epidemic was disproportionately affecting African-American and Latino communities and we saw the factors and circumstances that allowed that to happen in those communities beginning to happen in the Asian and Pacific-American communities,” he said. “When my small group of friends and I could count more of our Asian friends with HIV than what was being reported by the city Health Department at the time, we knew we had a problem.”
Liu led the agency for three subsequent years, growing its budget from the ground to about half-a-million dollars.
When the organization started, Liu said many API-serving agencies were hesitant to get involved in its work, stigma Liu said the agency successfully fought against.
Liu said that, while the need for culturally competent services such as those provided by ASIAC still stands, the organization was able to make substantial change in the community and city in its 18 years in operation.
“It didn’t end the epidemic but I believe it stemmed off the worst that could have been. The epidemic still exists so it’s not over, but I think we spared our communities the worst from happening,” he said. “I never imagined how successful ASIAC would become because this was a time, in 1995, when anything having to do with HIV was under a very dark cloud. So I’m very proud and very satisfied with what they’ve done in our community, but it’s still sad. It’s sad that circumstances have led to the closing.”