Take a walk with us!

What's better than a stroll through a historic Indianapolis neighborhood on a beautiful fall evening with good friends? Doing all that while supporting the Indiana AIDS Fund, we think! Join our 2012 Indiana AIDS Walk team for a "Walk Around the Block, where we'll walk roughly one-mile through historic Herron Morton Place.

Entertainment, food trucks, and activities along the route plus a wellness fair and awards make this a can't-miss event that supports the Gregory R. Powers Direct Emergency Financial Assistance (DEFA) Fund and benefits The Damien Center's clients. This a family friendly event, so bring your kids, cousins, grandparents, friends, and more - you can even bring your pets and their friends.

By walking with us and raising money through family, friends, co-workers, employers and others, you're helping provide funds for emergency shelter, utilities, food, medicine, transportation and other critical needs of those living with HIV/AIDS.

Here's the schedule:

Saturday, September 29, 2012
3:30 pm - Registration opens at 16th and Alabama Street
3:45pm - Live entertainment
4:30pm - Welcome and awards
5 pm - Step-off at 16th and Alabama

Immediately after the Walk, Greg's Our Place will be hosting a BBQ Party on the patio! The first 200 walkers (21 and up) get in free.

Location: Herron Morton Place

Register at IndianaAIDSwalk.org

25 Stories: Trial by Fire

Steve Everett’s first job at an AIDS service organization was supposed to be temporary. He’d taken an office manager position at Indiana Community AIDS Action Network (ICAAN), then housed in The Damien Center, just until he found his first teaching job. But instead, Steve, who grew up in rural Indiana with little exposure to the HIV/AIDS crisis, became unexpectedly passionate about the cause and has continued to work in the field since he first set foot in The Damien Center in 1991.

But those days, according to Steve, never saw a dull moment. “It was kind of trial by fire in the early days working here,” he says. Because The Damien Center was housed in an archdiocese building with a handful of other HIV-related organizations—Indiana Cares, ICAAN, Indiana Youth Group, Project Outreach, to name a few—the Center became a safe haven both for people infected with HIV and those who served them. That also meant people came from far and wide to seek the HIV/AIDS services offered by The Damien Center.

“There were many, many people that were coming to The Damien Center in the very end stages of the disease. They sometimes would walk in and just collapse,” Steve explains. “It was not uncommon to leave to go to lunch and then come back and there’d be an ambulance parked right at the front door.”

Those in need of care, says Steve, would drive in to the Center from as far Paoli, Indiana; Effingham, Illinois; or Dayton, Ohio because very few places in the Midwest outside of Chicago existed to provide these needed services. “They would hear about this Damien Center and make the trip,” Steve says, “but a lot of times their health was in such bad shape, that they had to go right to the hospital.”

Today, Steve serves as the director of programs for the Indiana Family Health Council, a quasi-federal agency that provides family planning services, testing, and more across Indiana. But he hasn’t forgotten his early experiences working in the field. “Back in the early days, it was by the seat of our pants,” he says. “Everything was kind of ‘let’s see what happens and then we’ll tweak it as we go along.’ Everything was very much a crisis approach.” The approach to prevention and care now, he says, has improved drastically and is “much more formalized.” Through his service in state government, private philanthropy, and nonprofit organizations, Steve has worked tirelessly to continue moving Indiana forward in providing services for those affected by HIV and in preventing the spread of it.

25 Stories: Bullwinkle's and GRID - Learning About AIDS in 1982

When Mark Lee, a young IU Hoosier with a painfully shy disposition, mustered up the courage to sneak into Bullwinkle’s one fateful evening in 1982, he had no idea his world would be turned upside down. Anxious about being carded and uncertain whether or where he belonged on the disco dance floor at one of Bloomington’s mainstay bars for the gay community, Mark turned to a publications rack for comfort and picked up the first thing he could find.

Skimming through an arbitrary publication, only half-focused on its contents, Mark’s eyes fell on an article about GRID (Gay-related immunodeficiency), a disease that would capture his attention for many years to come. Gay-related immunodeficiency, an early term for AIDS, was taking the gay community by storm, but fear was spreading just as quickly.

“No one knew where it was coming from,” Mark recalls. “They just knew that gay men in New York and San Francisco were dying of this horrible disease and that they were dying within six months of being diagnosed.”

For Mark, it was a wake-up call. Besides being his “first real experience in a gay bar or anything in the gay community,” Mark was drawn in by what he could do to keep himself safe in the midst of a national crisis. “I did a lot of reading,” he says. “I read everything I could on it: signs you might be positive, how to take care of yourself, anything.”

According to Mark, he came out just as the gay community was making a major shift. On the one hand, an era of promiscuity, bath houses, and anonymous sex was ending, while AIDS was only just beginning. “People started dying,” Mark says, “and then people started taking notice and taking care of themselves.”

Despite the initial fear and uncertainty, in the 30 years since Mark’s first foray into Bullwinkle’s, he’s become an advocate and activist for HIV/AIDS in too many ways to count. He was one of The Damien Center’s original “buddies,” a role in which he was paired up with HIV+ individuals to build friendships and develop a support system. More on that later. He also went on to work for Indiana Community AIDS Action Network and AIDServe Indiana and continues to support The Damien Center today. Though Bullwinkle’s closed its doors in 2006, the significance of Mark’s work in fighting HIV/AIDS and supporting those affected by it lives on.

My Name is Earl ... Conner.

Earl Conner: retired Episcopalian minister and committed AIDS activist. Not the namesake of The Damien Center—we'll get to that in a minute—but the man behind what has become Indiana's oldest and largest HIV/AIDS service organization. In the mid-1980s, when HIV and AIDS were still murky, scary, concepts, Earl stepped up to fight the spread of this deadly disease in his community. His alarm at the growing AIDS crisis in Indianapolis led him to seek a coordinated community response by uniting existing groups within one facility. With support from Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal church, and the Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul, a Catholic church, Earl established the Damien Center in an empty and forgotten archdiocese building in April of 1987.


Earl's friend Evelyn describes those first few months of planning and opening The Damien Center in this post. Though founded as an inter-faith collaboration, The Damien Center is now a fully independent, non-sectarian, not-for-profit public corporation, and Earl's vision for Indianapolis has, in 25 years, saved thousands of lives and enriched thousands more. The Damien Center is now a leader in HIV prevention, education, awareness, and advocacy. In 2011 alone, we served 1,126 clients through care coordination and administered 2,412 free HIV tests.

So where does The Damien Center's name come from? The Center is named after the Blessed Father Damien, a Belgian Catholic priest famed for his compassionate care for those affected by Hansen's Disease, or leprosy, on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Fr. Damien battled the religious and societal rejection of those living with the disease, choosing to live with and among them in the Molokai "lepers' colony" from 1873 until his own death from Hansen's Disease in 1889. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II and became a saint in October of 2009.

His compassion and care, along with Earl Conner's vision, live on through the work we now do at The Damien Center.