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Mission: HIV (Hygiene Is Vital)
All across the country, AIDS Service Organizations help people living with HIV/AIDS by assisting them in all areas of life. They provide financial help, transportation assistance, free testing, prevention programs, not to mention basics like food and personal care items.Funding for such organizations has been tough for quite some time now, but it's getting tougher as time goes on. With medications and doctors becoming more expensive, more funding goes to assisting clients in those areas, and less is available to cover the things we tend to take for granted.At the Southern Colorado AIDS Project (S-CAP), we have a full-service food bank that clients can access once per month. In addition to food, we also have some personal care items (TP, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, etc) for the clients to take, since those kinds of things can be very expensive at the grocery store. Unfortunately, while we can still use our grant budget to buy food for the food bank, we cannot use any of these funds for the personal care items. Any hygiene items must be donated to us.This is where you come in. Something we started doing is collecting hotel toiletries, since they often don't get used. We pack them together to make mini-hygiene kits, and clients can use them as an emergency supply or for traveling. These kits have been a wonderful resource when we've run out of regular-sized donations.To date, we have collected enough toiletries from your travels to make 470 hygiene kits for people living with HIV/AIDS. Most of the recipients have been S-CAP clients, but now that so many donations are coming in, we have branched out to serving other AIDS Service Organizations in the area. A few of you have even gathered too much to send in, and those have gone to organizations in YOUR local areas.If you don't travel often and still would like to help, there are other ways. Please contact me either through this site or through email (
[email protected]) if you would like some options. Likewise, if you have any ideas, please let me know.Now, about
me... I'm Jessica, and if you're curious (or just need to put a face with an idea), you can learn more about who I am here .
