About Us

AIDS Project of Southern Vermont

The AIDS Project of Southern Vermont is a regional AIDS service organization that provides direct services to people living with HIV/AIDS, and HIV prevention services to those at highest risk in Windham, Bennington, and southern Windsor counties.

Founded by volunteers in 1988 as a grassroots, community based group, the AIDS Project now fills an important statewide role in making sure that Vermont’s fight against the AIDS epidemic is strong and effective.

Excerpt from Our Annual Report - 2006 (Download 2006 Annual Report PDF - 695k)

GREETINGS!

Welcome to the AIDS Project’s 2006 Annual Report.  Here you’ll see people in our community joining together to fight the AIDS epidemic.  You’ll find evidence that Vermonters continue to offer care and compassion for people living with HIV.  You’ll see news of vigorous programs here in Southern Vermont aimed at preventing new HIV infections.

In these pages you will read about our Direct Services, HIV Prevention and HIV Testing programs.  You will see images of hope and kindness alongside descriptions of safer sex workshops, food deliveries, 20-minute HIV tests, and “social work” – which despite its dull name can be and often is life-changing and even life-saving.  You will also see a high level of financial support from our own neighborhoods and a very long list of donors and volunteers, the heart of our community support.

What many of you will also see is history, a story of our rural community’s steadfast effort to overcome prejudice, fight against misinformation, and calm fears about AIDS over many years.  Many of us have been part of the AIDS Project community for a long time, some since the very beginning in 1988!  In those days only a few had the foresight to realize that AIDS would come to small towns or understand that it was vital to start training volunteers who would be needed to help local residents living with HIV right here in Vermont.  Only a few grasped that it was necessary or even possible to challenge a government whose leaders would not speak the word “AIDS”, much less fund services.

Some of you are new to our work or have only experienced one piece of the Project – as a volunteer buddy for Direct Services, as a Board member, as someone delivering Dove food, or a peer educator in HIV Prevention.  For everyone reading this Report, it is true that the world of HIV/AIDS continues to change as we speak – and at the same time remains, unfortunately, the same.  In many places, including Vermont, some of the same stigma exists as existed in 1988: the same stigma, the same fear, and the same hurtful actions against people living with or at risk for HIV.

On behalf of our clients, Board members and staff members, we want to thank everyone in the community who has helped the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont to make sure that this same kind of fear has no chance to prosper in Southern Vermont, not in the schools, not in the faith community, not in businesses and not in homes.

Greg Lesch

Chair, Board of Directors

Susan Bell

Executive Director

 

Our Annual Report - 2005 (Download 2005 Annual Report PDF - 695k)

Our Annual Report - 2004 (Download 2004 Annual Report PDF - 233k)

Our Annual Report - 2003 (Download 2003 Annual Report PDF - 966k)

Our Annual Report - 2002 (Download 2002 Annual Report PDF - 894k)

Back to top