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BROADWAY CARES / EQUITY FIGHTS AIDS
Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS recognizes the critical role that appropriate nutrition plays in the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS. For nearly 20 years, BC/EFA has dedicated its fundraising and grant making to meeting the fundamental and immediate needs of people living with HIV/AIDS. Traditionally, our National Grants Program has encompassed 6 categories: Food Services; Direct Services; Emergency Financial Services; One-Time Expense Request; Harm Reduction, and Quality of Life Services. BC/EFA serves as a grant-making conduit between Broadway audiences compelled by the appeals of entertainment professionals to immediately respond to most basic needs of people with HIV/AIDS. Consistent with this ideal, our grant-making targets direct services. Nothing embodies this concept more than ensuring a person who is sick has a decent meal. With this strategy in mind, BC/EFA determined to make the Food Service Category its own separate grant round commencing January 2006, affording the opportunity for a larger award than was available in the overall national grant round awarded every spring. In addition, we have heard from both the entertainment community and our donors who admit that while they are still deeply concerned about HIV/AIDS are also concerned about the ability of people homebound with other life threatening diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, and chronic hepatitis to receive regularly delivered meals. In the last two years, a number of the largest meal delivery programs have tested expanding their services to include those with other debilitating illness. BC/EFA believes that this expansion of services is a smart, strategic plan that not only offers assistance to more people in need, but in doing so increases funding opportunities in a very difficult fundraising climate, thereby ensuring that delivered meals will continued to be provided to people with AIDS for the foreseeable future. Truly, this kind of expansion of services is the “wave of the future” as funding levels have become so critical that many stand-alone AIDS service organizations may not survive. By breaking out the food service category and offering a larger grant to those organizations willing to consider expanded services, BC/EFA seeks to prioritize assistance to food service providers and recognize those organizations willing to “look outside the box”, and encourage others to do so. In our 20 years of grant-making we have been blessed with the combined generous efforts of entertainment professionals and the extraordinary response of Broadway’s audiences who together make BC/EFA’s fundraising possible. We are fortunate to be able to set aside funds that support meal programs which serve both people living with HIV and those with other serious illnesses. This grant will be offered annually in January. Grants in the other 5 categories will continue to be made annually, in May.
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