E-Newsletter September 2024

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Poz Café: The Beginnings

Our original planning team included three people living with HIV (Jim Crouch, Noel Floresca, and Suzanna Elliott), two volunteers (Marla Moody and Arlette Jullien), a provider from a partner HIV agency (Shelby Flint), and Scott Blades and eventually volunteer Janet Smith and the TIHAN program manager (starting with Sarah Pratt).

Lots of program names were suggested, but the name Poz Café won out over suggestions such as Kindness Café and Cafe TIHAN. St. Francis was chosen for the location because 1) they were willing to let us take over their entire campus and reserve it for us once a month –at no charge, 2) they had a nice kitchen and a large room for dining, and 3) it was a beautiful setting in the foothills, far away from the hustle and bustle of living in the middle of the city, a place of refuge for our CarePartners.

We started with TIHAN providing the entrée, and having the sponsoring congregation preparing the sides and desserts at their homes or their faith community kitchens, and having the volunteers serve it. We wanted to make sure the focus was on people living with HIV feeling safe and connecting with others for peer support, with the volunteers helping but staying in the background. At one point, we had way too many volunteers, even outnumbering the CarePartners living with HIV, and some folks felt like they were being watched over, so we quickly cut back on the number of volunteers.

Food & Friends

The food: one of the early disasters that us old-timers laugh about was the pumpkin soup, that was a great idea in theory, but no one liked it! Chef Jackie Blue’s famous lasagna was a big hit, though, and Lee and Alan did some great grilling outside in the heat to make burgers, which were also very popular. And we always secretly kept a few frozen lasagnas in the freezer, just in case of an entrée disaster, ready to be microwaved at a moment’s notice.

We always wanted Poz Café to have a balance of comfort food and healthier food (but NOT health food, as everyone always reminded us)! For many folks, this was the one time all month that they would be eating outside of the home. So we had to make good food, but we wanted familiar comfort foods. We realized that, although it’s a lunch program, the main reason most folks were showing up was the socialization, a chance to meet peers (and volunteers too) in a safe environment outside of the gay bars. The food had to be good for folks to show up, but the companionships and connections were of utmost importance.

“Poz Café is alive. It literally brought me back to life. It got me out of seclusion and I was able to feel like a worthwhile person again, just from seeing and feeling the love and compassion at Poz Café that first time. No one was afraid of me. All those smiles and hugs. Do they really want to hug me?—they did. I felt emotions that I hadn’t felt for a long time because of the shame, sadness, and rejection I was carrying within me. Spiritually, my heart felt very welcomed. I was able to experience inner peace. I had attempted suicide before, and was considering it again. I didn’t see a future for myself. Until Poz Café. It saved me. It brought me back to life. Poz Café is alive.”
–A CarePartner living with HIV

Growing in Service

As attendance grew and it was no longer just a small potluck gathering, we started being more concerned about making sure we were following all of the regulations and health department codes. It was a tough transition when we had to tell the wonderful women at the Tucson Urban League that all the food would now have to be prepared onsite, and they could no longer bring their delicious home-made sweet potato pies to the luncheon!

When we started with a small crowd, one sponsor each month could provide the volunteers and food. But soon we needed two sponsors to bring volunteers and split the food costs. And then three!

As we grew, some things became more complicated. At one time, we were offering three options for the monthly entrée: a beef option, a chicken option, and a vegetarian option. It soon became clear that almost everyone wanted to try all three, so we quickly went back to a simpler menu.

Opening It Up

We learned other lessons in those early years: at first, we were limiting attendance to people living with HIV, but our CarePartners told us they wanted to bring a friend, partner or family member—sometimes counting on them to provide transportation to get them there, so we added the ability for each CarePartner to bring a guest.

Where CarePartners can bring their family member or friend to proudly introduce them to this gathering of peers and show them that there is a place free to stigma, where they can introduce them to their friends, both CarePartners and volunteers, who make up an important part of their support system, and who model a compassionate, stigma-free community filled with hugs and smiles and laughs.

“I love the volunteers at Poz Café. I remember the first time I showed up at Poz Café. Their handshakes and hugs and the welcome – and sitting down with us over lunch and talking. That means a lot to me to feel that true support. Years ago, one of the first persons I told about my HIV status betrayed my trust. And one of the pastors at my church had stayed away from me after he found out I have AIDS. So having all these volunteers be so warm and accepting is very healing. Poz Café is the one place I can be open and free.”
–A CarePartner living with HIV

Making It Special

We wanted to make sure Poz Café would not feel like a soup kitchen, but would be as nice as we could make it.

When St. Francis installed an industrial dishwasher, we were able to provide glasses, real plates, silverware, and drinking glasses (if you heard some of our CarePartners share their stories, you may have heard people talk about the pain of having family members ask them to eat on disposable paper plates with plastic forks, believing incorrectly that HIV could be transmitted through sharing dishes and forks). We also added linen tablecloths and centerpieces for each table. This was a passion of longtime TIHAN hero Janet Smith, who was known to carefully instruct the sponsoring groups’ volunteers how to properly fold the napkins. “Everything needs to look top-notch, like La Paloma (a very upscale Foothills resort) for our CarePartners. This is their meal, prepared by us to make everyone feel cared about, worthy of love, and extra special.”

“It’s a good time to get together with other positive people and have a wonderful meal. My lunches usually consist of frozen burritos and bologna and cheese sandwiches. So when I go to Poz Café it’s a real treat. One of the most memorable meals I’ve had at Poz Café was when you served lemon pepper chicken, which I’d never had before. It was so delicious!”
–A CarePartner living with HIV

Early on, we offered card and board games after lunch, and even did various arts and crafts projects, but the thing that really caught on was BINGO! We had some serious bingo players, and the prize for the winner — a gallon of laundry detergent – was highly sought after! We began asking clergy to be our bingo callers, and some of them grew to love the role, saving all their awful jokes for our adoring crowd.

One of the challenges we’ve had to deal with has been, since Poz Café is the largest regular gathering place for people living with HIV in Southern Arizona, people and groups wanted to do announcements or presentations about their own program or another important issue. Our planning team wanted to make sure to not interfere with the fun, uplifting social purpose of Poz Café. We have a resource table where pre-approved materials can be placed for those who are interested. The bigger challenge was what to do when a CarePartner passed away, as the Poz Café setting was the place where the most people could get word about that. For many people, talk about someone death was not something they wanted to hear at their safe space, but others felt it was better for them to hear bad news when they were among friends who could provide support. Our planning team decided the best balance was to put a photo of any CarePartners who passed away in the past month in a separate room with a candle and chairs to sit and remember them. CarePartners who wanted to know could go visit the room to see if any of their friends had passed, and those who did not want to know could not enter the room. Fortunately, over the years, fewer and fewer of our CarePartners pass away, and this has not been a need in recent years.

Personal and Community Impact

In our very first year (1999), volunteers from 11 congregations (from 7 different denominations) served 497 meals to 97 persons living with HIV (82 men and 15 women) and their guests. But it grew and grew. We don’t have the exact count, but we know we’ve had over 1,000 people with HIV attend, and more than 3,000 volunteers participate in our service-learning program.

We were so excited when in 2004, the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona named Poz Café as one three finalists for their Achievement Award in the category “Innovation” among small non-profits, with their kind words about TIHAN’s collaborative model and focus on collaboration, service, and education.

Starting in 1999 with just a few people sharing a meal around one table, by 2008 we were serving our 10,000th meal. In 2014, we commemorated 20,000 meals, and in 2020 we served our 30,000 meal. Today, we’re over 36,000, and still going strong.

Community Support

We started out doing this Poz Café event on the 3rd Thursday of the month, and have kept to that schedule, changing at some point only in December, when it’s an early evening dinner on a different night based on venue availability. Poz Café started at St. Francis in the Foothills United Methodist Church, in their multi-purpose sanctuary, and stayed there every 3rd Thursday until COVID, which forced us to move to a more central location due to transportation challenges for many of our CarePartners with HIV. Fortunately, our partners at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church rescued us and offered their beautiful space with an enclosed courtyard, which made a perfect setting outdoors for people who weren’t ready to be gathered in large groups just yet.

Like all of TIHAN, Poz Cafe is built on collaboration. Every year, dozens of faith communities, businesses, and groups help with Poz Café, and our annual resource fair has involved more than 20 organizations offering resources and answering questions about support services that will benefit CarePartners and their families, an effort we will be re-implementing in 2024!

In addition to St Francis and AGRA, major support for the program has come from Broadway CARES/Equity Fights AIDS (one of the country’s largest grantor of funds to support food programs for people with HIV), St. Pius X Catholic Church, Marc Brunelle and his partner Lloyd Engle, the Leveler Foundation, and Rick Small and the Stonewall Fund at the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona.

We’ve had a handful of chefs overseeing the menus, kitchen operations, and serving over the 25 years of Poz Café, and Chef Roy DeBise was perhaps the one who took Poz Café to the next level. Roy’s passion for feeding people and for caring for people living with HIV, along with his restaurant and catering experience and his larger than life personality, made an unforgettable experience for everyone who came in contact with him.

“I love the balanced meals—sometimes that is the only balanced meal I get. When I’m depressed, I don’t want to cook.”

“I’m by myself and being with others makes me enjoy the meal even more. I can talk about anything there. Anything. Sometimes out in the world, I’ve told people I’m positive, and you get a cold shoulder. I do get lonely sometimes since my partner died. And Poz Cafe helps a lot. I go every month and meet others like me who have HIV – it’s been a great help for my social life. It really lifts my spirits – seeing others and enjoying a good meal makes me feel better.”

Poz Café has always been about partnerships, and involving faith communities and groups to help learn about HIV and then serve the HIV community. Our friends at SAAF helped provide transportation in the early days, then COPE Community Services took that on. Even before we started the program, our friends at the Arizona Gay Rodeo Association pledged their support with Poz Café’s first donation: a $1,000 gift to get us started. And Marky Marc and his fellow bartenders at the Stonewall/Eagle bar started raising money for TIHAN to keep it up, beginning their Turnabout for TIHAN benefit show that became a huge hit over the decades.

In 2017, TIHAN began a partnership with Amity Foundation, a residential treatment program for people recovering from substance abuse and incarceration. In the early days of AIDS, Amity was the only local treatment program that would accept people with HIV, and their mission of inclusion and helping people turn around the narrative of their lives fit perfectly with TIHAN. We began partnering Amity’s Culinary Arts department and their chefs, and they added volunteers to our team to make our lunch and social program more robust.

COVID Requires Transformation

In 2020, COVID necessitated Poz Café to transform from a warm community table of friends into a sterile parking lot drive-by pickup of a to-go meal, with everyone wearing masks and staying socially distanced, playing bingo afterwards by Zoom (for the few with the technology and skills to access that.) Still, we served meals to record numbers of CarePartners during the pandemic, and folks came out and waited in long lines in the summer heat and the winter cold, in part of the delicious meal, but even more so to say hello at a distance, behind a mask to a volunteer or staff member—the only social contact some folks had during those days of isolation. Fortunately, in 2023, we were able to re-start our in-person lunch and social program.

“With this disease, it’s easy for me to lose track of myself sometimes and go into a depression. But Poz Cafe never lets me down. I always have a better attitude when I walk out of that place, feeling like things aren’t so bad after all, and life is worth living. Poz Cafe helps people feel connected to humanity, and gives you hope to keep going.”

Brightening the Holidays

Each December (except for those Covid years), Poz Café transforms from a lunch into a holiday dinner. Working with SAAF and sponsoring congregations, we host an evening gathering with a nicer menu, featuring dancing and distribution of holiday gifts, and it draws our biggest crowd of the year as more folks come out during this time of year when people are especially seeking community. Many CarePartners dress up in their best for what has become their holiday party, a TIHAN tradition filled with meaning.

Silence = Death; Poz Café = Life

Sometimes, people think that HIV equals death and sadness, and I can’t deny that there are times when grief and the loss of friends hurts more than I want to endure, when it’s devastating to see the challenges that injustice brings to bear upon beautiful people who experience judgment, stigma, and a diminished sense of self-worth because of a miniscule virus that somehow turned around their life. But it is also true that Poz Café is a testament, 25 years and counting, that HIV can be about life and love, finding meaning and focusing on friends who see you and understand the struggles, the resilience, the lessons learned about priorities and acceptance and appreciation for another day. It’s a triumph of humanity. Seeing people and businesses and faith communities bring their very best, their most giving and generous nature, to create a new reality. We often hear CarePartners share this in various ways: “When people who don’t even know me aren’t afraid of me, don’t judge me, and they are giving of their valuable time and energy and resources to make me smile and relax and feel like a part of something instead of feeling apart from everything, when even my own family and friends can’t or won’t or don’t know how to show me love, it helps me see that there’s nothing wrong with me. I am a beautiful part of a beautiful community, and my life is important and I am deserving of dignity and care just like everyone else.”

At Poz Café, you see great diversity of people with HIV—some folks newly diagnosed, or newly addressing their HIV, as well as people who’ve been living with the virus for decades. It’s a place you can get some first-hand tips about new programs, or how to access a service you never heard about, or how to get what you need from your case manager. Where you learn about how to deal with medication side effects, or judgmental people, or how and when to disclose your status to someone you are interested in dating, or how to tell your mom that you have HIV and assure her you are going to be ok.

“After I first got diagnosed with HIV, Poz Café was the first time I met others within the community. It helped me come to terms with myself. And still today it’s important for me to attend every month because it’s a reminder that I’m not alone.”

One of the reasons that we often hear from CarePartners: I’ve lived in several cities and accessed HIV support services in other locations, but I have met more people and have formed better connections with peers living with HIV through TIHAN than anywhere else.

“I came today with some people I met at the last Poz Café. And that just shows how easy it is to meet people here. We were just standing in line and we turned around and started talking, and we’re becoming better friends. There are not really other places I could be going for this kind of friendship and food.”

One of our CarePartners talks about Poz Café being the one day a month that he feels fully alive, a day when he feels like he’s a person, not just a “patient” defined solely by his AIDS diagnosis. Poz Café is not just a safe place where you wont be judged for HIV. It’s a safe place to meet people in a healthier setting. One of our CarePartners living with HIV shared how helpful Poz Café was when he was getting sober, and when he was working on how to deal with his depression, and when he was having trouble getting through the months without any money left to live on.

One of the fascinating impacts of Poz Café (and TIHAN in general) is the impact of the sponsoring faith communities at Poz Café. Having progressive and caring Christian and Jewish congregations and their members (and sometimes clergy) is meaningful for many of our CarePartners. We knew that would be helpful in addressing stigma around HIV, even if they were only setting up the tables and cooking and serving the food and bussing the tables and calling BINGO. But we also heard from some CarePartners that they considered that a form of “spiritual support” that sustained them. We were always careful to make sure everyone knew we had no religious agenda, but suddenly CarePartners were talking about the “spiritual support” they received from TIHAN, and we were confused about that, until they talked more.

Jim, Jeffrey, Iva, TJ, Frank, Scott, Georgeannie, Butch, Marc, Noel, George, Tim, and so many more memorable CarePartners have graced our doors and helped make Poz Café such a success as they light up the room with their smiles and hugs. As have many well-loved staff (from Sarah to Deirdre to Gina and every staff in between who has coordinated Poz Café) and volunteers.

“This is my first time, and I think it’s wonderful that we can feel such a sense of community, of being together. The thing is, in this day and age, it’s so lonely out there, and this way we feel like a part of a big family. It’s nice. What makes it so lonely? Well, think about how apathetic society is becoming, how complacent everyone is. Poz Café shows that’s not true, that people do care.”

CarePackage Support

At some point along the way, we added a new component to Poz Café: the Poz Marketplace. It was a separate room at Poz Café where people could bring donations of toiletries (especially toilet tissue which was in great demand due to the very common side effect of diarrhea). After lunch, CarePartners could go “shopping” in the Marketplace and take what they needed. Soon we were getting enough donations that we needed to bring bags for them to carry their items. And eventually, we started preparing the bags in the morning before Poz Café, stocking them with a host of items. Soon, we started asking the sponsoring congregations and groups to collect and bring toiletry items, and also encouraging them to get youth groups or others to decorate the Trader Joe’s bags to make them not have a “handout” vibe, but to feel more like a gift. And an added bonus: when their youth groups decorated the bags, they could also receive an age-appropriate lesson about HIV and helping people in need. The CarePackage program later expanded outside of Poz Café and we offer them all through the month, and have now provided more than 27,000 CarePackages to people living with HIV.

Serving Our Diverse Community

52% of TIHAN’s CarePartners are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color). The people served by our meal and social program are primarily seniors with HIV who are living alone, people who identify as LGBTQ+, and people living in poverty, with many long-term HIVsurvivors and people with substance abuse and mental health histories. Through providing food and social connections to underserved community members, we help keep people connected to medical and behavioral healthcare and our network of support. Meals are a gateway to health, and connections to community and additional support services.

Poz Café brings people together, through food and socialization.

Food is nutrition. Food is medicine. Food is love. And sharing food together creates connections and community. I have so many great memories of Poz Café and all who have contributed over the decades. Thank you all for making it possible for 25 years, and keeping us going with new and exciting developments still to come…