Advocates said funding inequities are leaving several Black-led HIV and AIDS prevention groups struggling to keep doors open and provide care.
They’re pushing for more help from local lawmakers to prioritize Black and Brown people, who they say are uniquely impacted by the virus.
Timothy Jackson, senior director of policy and advocacy at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, said many factors contribute to Black and Latino people not getting care — a lack of adequate health insurance, poverty, housing insecurity and a persistent stigma against some medications like pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.
“What we see generally in Black and Latinx spaces is for a variety of reasons — from medical mistrust to lack of culturally competent provider education,” Jackson said. “There are stigmas attached to PrEP and a host of other issues. Access to PrEP is a thing. It is not cheap.”
Meanwhile, federal cuts to grants, Medicaid and diversity initiatives are also threatening to weaken the response to the disease.
The Trump administration has been cracking down on diversity initiatives and taking away funding for them. President Donald Trump has also targeted gender-affirming care. He issued an executive order that takes away funding for services for transgender youth.
Jackson said he’s worried these sweeping cuts could roll back decades of progress on HIV prevention.
“There’s no money coming from the federal government,” Jackson said. “How do you take care of those people? Priority No. 1 is, how do we preserve access to care and prevention for people living with and vulnerable to HIV?”
Chris Balthazar, executive director at TaskForce Prevention and Community Services, an organization based in Austin, said many state and local grants are allocated to larger predominantly White HIV prevention groups. He said this becomes challenging when trying to secure funding as a small Black-led organization serving communities that are disproportionately impacted by the virus.
Illinois Department of Public Health data shows Black and Hispanic people make up about 73% of HIV and AIDS cases diagnosed in the state since 2018. But U.S. Census data shows the state is only 14% Black and 18% Hispanic.
“There have been some challenges with ensuring that those dollars can continue to go to serve those communities,” Balthazar said. “We’ve seen similar conversations even with the Chicago Department of Public Health where initially they were hoping to allocate dollars to Black same-gender-loving communities and had to come back and say, ‘Actually, now, because of these new rules and because we’re using CDC dollars, we actually can’t do that anymore.’”
This year, about 30% of TaskForce’s budget is made up of federal money. But Balthazar said he anticipates the group will get 10-15% less in grants for the next fiscal year. That means his team has had to become more creative to come up with alternative funding sources.
“We are certainly strategizing and planning to do everything that we can to prevent future layoffs or being in a position where we have to turn people away or cut some of our services,” Balthazar said. “We also recognize and realize that the private sector could never fully cover what the government has previously covered.”
