On July 10, hundreds of bicyclists and crew will take off from the Twin Cities for the first Minnesota Red Ribbon Ride. Over four days they will ride more than 300 miles, making a loop through southwest Minnesota and back to the Twin Cities. They expect to raise over half a million dollars for nine Minnesota-based HIV/AIDS service organizations. Each issue until the ride, queue press will introduce you to some of those organizations.

“People used to think that rural sex was safe sex,” says Linda Brandt, executive director and client service director of the Rural AIDS Action Network.

Minneapolis-based Brandt founded RAAN in her basement in 1992 as a group of volunteers to organize and sustain communities of volunteers that can support and care for people living with, affected by, or at risk for HIV/AIDS in the rural midwest. The 20-member founding advisory group was scattered all over Minnesota. Today RAAN offers free and confidential testing, support groups, home health care, HIV medications, legal assistance, meals, housing, and much more.

“We’re culturally competent in rural Minnesota,” Brandt says, “and proud of it.”

That means not asking people in rural areas to go public in order to get support. “We meet them where they find a comfort zone and we become the ‘safety net’ and buffer to the services they need,” Brandt says.

RAAN’s primary goal is organizing rural multi-county networks of local volunteers and professionals who can then serve the local populations in need. RAAN serves between 200 and 250 people living with AIDS every year. Last year 50 new people living with AIDS entered the network.

Three regional care centers based in Hibbing, LeSueur and Alexandria provide medical care, mental-health care and dental care. These centers are clinics where the health-care providers have been trained to provide HIV-competent and -compassionate care in local areas with co-management from infectious disease experts as mentors at every visit. RAAN is expanding to include three more clinics this year.

A registered nurse, Brandt has worked in a variety of HIV/AIDS advocacy and educational roles. “I grew up in Decorah, Iowa,” she says, “and felt a great connection to the pain and isolation that I found in persons living in rural Minnesota as a case manager. I felt that the urban solutions were not culturally appropriate and that AIDS-compassionate volunteers and professionals existed everywhere but they were ‘in the closet’ due their own fears about being known.”

The fundraising aspect of the Ride is particularly important to organizations like RAAN. “It’s a tough time for all of us,” she says. “We just had a $20,000 cut for our new Women’s Prevention Education Circle. Foundations are out of cash due to the stock market crash. More than 50% of our budget is tied to President Bush federal budget changes for 2005.”

Brandt says that the people behind RAAN are committed to continue as long as stigma and isolation exists. “Our volunteers know how to help even if we lose all our funding,” she says.
There doesn’t seem to be any chance of that, not with people like Brandt on the Ride. “I am rider #2!!!” she writes by email.

For more information, visit www.raan.org.


Mark Hiemenz is so proud of Open Arms of Minnesota. But it’s not the pride you predictably find in all executive directors of nonprofit organizations, like “Oh, our volunteers are the best” (though Hiemenz insists they are) or “Oh, everyone has such a great time” (though Hiemenz insists that’s true, too).

His pride is more specific: “Our food doesn’t smell like boiled broccoli. It’s really good!”
Open Arms of Minnesota started as an Aliveness Project plan 15 years ago to provide food to people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Think of it as Really Good Meals on Wheels for People Living with and Affected by AIDS.

In 1990, Open Arms spun off on its own, and five years ago the organization moved into its current home near Franklin and Bloomington Avenues in Minneapolis. The new space, with offices and a restaurant-quality kitchen, is where 450 volunteers prepared and deliver over 76,000 meals last year—and that number is going up. Volunteer director Molly Matheson says that the volunteers come from all over the metro area, from high schools and colleges, faith communities, individuals who are affected by HIV/AIDS, and corporations.

Around noon every weekday, Open Arms volunteers drop off around 200 packages that contain a lunch, a heatable dinner, a snack and breakfast food. Clients include not just people living with AIDS, but those affected by AIDS as well—like children of a parent with AIDS. Open Arms also supplies lunch for Park House, a day health and mental-health day treatment program for people with HIV/AIDS.

When Open Arms first started, Hiemenz says, a typical client was probably a white gay male. “The numbers have been shifting,” he says. “More than 50% of our clients are people of color. Thirty-five percent are women and children. And 42% of our new clients since 2001 are women and children.”

Client service director Kent Linder says that clients are increasingly geographically diverse too. Ten percent of the clients now live in the suburbs. “That has been growing this year,” he says. “It was half that just eight months ago.”

Most people find Open Arms through a caseworker from Minnesota AIDS Project or another AIDS service organization. “We’ve never had to turn people down,” Hiemenz says. “We hope to continue to meet the need.”

For more information, visit www.openarmsmn.org.