God's Love We Deliver

The question of how to respond to the AIDS epidemic has been much discussed. God's Love We Deliver is one practical and simple response. It addresses a need which is experienced from time to time by many persons who have AIDS: the need for home delivered meals.

God's Love We Deliver, Inc., a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, community-based organization, delivers daily free gourmet meals to homebound people with AIDS. Ganga Stone is Executive Director. The only service of its kind in New York City, it is a ministry that fills an extraordinary need.

1. How the Program Began

God's Love We Deliver began in the summer of 1985. Its founder, Ganga Stone, was serving as a volunteer at Cabrini Hospice. She was asked to pick up a bag of food at a Greenwich Village church and take it to a young man confined to his home by the effects of AIDS. When she got there, she saw that Richard was bedridden as well as homebound. He was unable to use the soup mix, canned hash and dried macaroni and cheese that she had brought. His nurse could not do much for him on the double-burner hot plate that was his stove. Richard had no money for restaurant food since he had been unable to work for over two years.

Richard was hungry and extremely anxious about his situation. He had phoned every state, city, religious and gay organization that might bring him prepared meals and had learned that there was no organization in New York City able to feed people in his predicament. Ganga Stone and Jane Ellen Best, co-founders of God's Love We Deliver, vowed they would do whatever it took to assure that everyone in Richard's situation would be fed.

God's Love We Deliver grew in stages from that strong commitment. The program's first meals were either purchased or cooked at home by Ganga and Jane. That soon became impossible, as more homebound people with AIDS began to call for food. The next stage, which continued until August 1987, involved getting meals donated by some of New York's restaurants. The cooperation from the restaurant community was superb.

Over 660 meals were prepared to order for God's Love We Deliver clients. But the increasing demand for the program's service necessitated the opening of a kitchen located in space donated by the West Park Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. In the short time the kitchen has been in operation, meals have been served to over 280 homebound people with AIDS.

In the immediate future, God's Love We Deliver will be extending its services to Bronx and Brooklyn, New York as well as to Key West, Florida where the program has been offered the use of a local church kitchen. The Bronx extension will also require opening another kitchen through which large numbers of women with children will receive home delivered meals because in many instances whole families are affected by AIDS.

2. The First Step: Making a Commitment

In the beginning, the co-founders of God's Love We Deliver had no idea how to meet the food needs of homebound people with AIDS. They had no funding, were not incorporated, and had no tax-exempt status. Nonetheless, three and a half years later, having taken one step at a time, the program has served over 27,000 meals. The following is a brief description by Ganga and Jane of the steps they took.

• We made a commitment to do whatever was necessary to feed homebound people with AIDS.

• We informed the local caregivers, social workers, AIDS service organizations, hospitals and churches of our intention and invited them to refer clients to us.

• Initially we purchased meals from restaurants or cooked at home for the first few clients.

• As the number of clients grew, we approached the best local restaurants and asked that cooked-to-order meals be donated on request for our clients. We met with wonderful cooperation.

• We invited our clients to call by 11 A.M. if they needed a meal. We then phoned people who had volunteered to deliver meals. When the volunteer was located, we phoned a participating restaurant and ordered the meal the client had requested. We then repeated the process for each of that day's clients. In this way, we were able to feed up to eight clients a day without any funding.

• We began to search for, and after eighteen months did locate, a vacant church kitchen in which we could prepare meals ourselves and thereby feed many more clients.

• We placed donation cans in many local businesses (restaurants, boutiques, grocery stores, etc.) which yielded enough money to salary two people full-time. This also spread the word about our work, and brought in additional clients and volunteers.

• We applied for and received tax-exempt status. We applied for State start-up money for the kitchen. This included salary money for a full-time chef.

• We applied to foundations and corporations for financial support which was forthcoming.

• We purchased a van, hired a driver, and began to feed up to 50 homebound people a day.

• We added additional kitchen and administrative staff and are currently feeding 120-150 people a day.

This is just an overview of how we grew. The challenges which arose as we proceeded melted before a combination of determination and prodigious grace. Whatever was needed to carry out this ministry has come to us. And we experience the joy of Thanksgiving and Christmas all year round.

If you want to feed homebound and/or indigent people with AIDS, let us help you. We can adapt our model to suit your community's needs. Together we can make sure that no homebound person with AIDS goes hungry.

3. God's Love We Deliver: The Rest of the Story

God's Love We Deliver, Inc. makes more than food available to its clients and has some big plans for the future. Its current services and hopes for the future include the following.

The Phone Network

The Phone Network links homebound people with AIDS with other PWAs for the purpose of companionship and mutual support. Persons who are homebound frequently experience isolation and a feeling of uselessness. Through The Phone Network, persons with AIDS offer one another moral support, strong love, courage and wisdom. A homebound person with AIDS might be unaware of how much strength and clarity he or she has acquired until these qualities are needed by someone else.

The Autobiography

God's Love We Deliver volunteers serve as oral historians for homebound PWAs. Using a tape recorder and some suggested questions, the volunteer, in a series of conversations over many weeks, assists interested PWAs in telling their stories.

A typed manuscript is prepared from the tapes. It is returned to the PWA for his/her editing, and released for publication if the PWA desires. At the very least, The Autobiography is his or her legacy for family and friends.

A Home in the Making

Many people with AIDS have lost their homes as a direct result of their illness. Many others are living in dismal isolation, having been deserted by family and friends. And others have the desire to find a new environment in which to live through a new stage of life.

God's Love We Deliver sees the need for a country home, gracious and welcoming, where a person with AIDS can enjoy both community life and solitary time as well; where service to others remains a possibility to the last days of life; where medical, social and spiritual needs can be met.

The Home will be a haven for PWAs from all backgrounds. Each resident will be asked to contribute to the running of the Home to the extent of his or her capabilities.

Visiting clergy and teachers from all traditions will be available to the residents and staff. Ongoing seminars on Death and Dying will be available to interested residents and staff, with emphasis on the scriptural as well as recent scientific evidence of the persistence of consciousness beyond the body's death.

The Home will be located in the countryside within 2 hours of New York City. Vans will run back and forth frequently to transport residents, their families and friends. Overnight accommodations ill be available for guests of the residents and the staff.

Education Services

The underlying assumption of these educational programs is that people with AIDS are not under some unique threat of physical mortality. All share a guarantee that life in this physical body will end. Since the transition called death must be undergone by each person, preparation for that event is an intelligent, logical and entirely appropriate thing to do. Just as a woman entering childbirth well informed and trained has far greater mastery and less fear, so too a person approaching death can do so with less fear and a greater sense of calm if spiritual and intellectual preparations have been made. Childbirth education, now so widely taught, has only come about within the last 50 years. Practical education in Death and Dying is needed now as universally and urgently s childbirth education was needed then.

Two-day Workshops offer both a theoretical and a practical approach to the issues of Death and Dying. The emphasis of the first day's program is on Conquering the Fear of Death--the focus of the second day is on Preparing for a Peaceful Death. Follow-up meetings are offered to insure that each participant attain the level of personal mastery he or she desires.

The Speakers Bureau

People with AIDS can be powerful teachers. God's Love We Deliver provides a Speakers Bureau which responds to requests for speakers from schools, churches and civic groups.

AFTERWORD by Cathie Lyons

The HIV Epidemic in the United States has brought into bold relief a number of pre-existing unmet needs. To mention but a few, these include: the need for food, housing, in-home care, coordinated community services, access to basic health care for all, and disease prevention education.

Testimonies (by persons with AIDS, their loved ones and care providers) made before the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic further emphasized these needs and the impact they will have on the lives and families of the 1.5 million people in the U.S. who are estimated to be infected with the AIDS virus.

This month's Focus Paper addresses one of these needs and the steps taken by two women in response. If this same need does not exist, yet, in your community it might in the near future. There are creative and practical ways in which your church and community can respond. Perhaps the God's Love We Deliver Approach would work where you are.

Ganga Stone and Jane Ellen Best are willing to consult with interested church persons throughout the country. I am inspired by their commitment to work with others in places large and small to assure that no person with AIDS or HIV diseases is left unfed. Over the years, God's Love We Deliver has responded to more than just the hunger for food, though home delivered meals are the program's centerpiece. Today, the program is responding to other things which persons hunger and thirst for in sickness and in health: the hunger to be loved, to be accepted; the hunger for communication, to have one's story heard, to grasp the reality that dying and death are part of life's journey. God's Love We Deliver is a good example of how food, lovingly prepared and delivered, provides physical, spiritual and emotional nurture to the giver and the receiver.

I would like to end this Focus Paper by quoting retired U.S. Navy Admiral James Watkins who chaired the Presidential Commission. In forwarding the Report to the President, Watkins wrote:

"Mr. President, you afforded the Commission an unusual opportunity to view contemporary American society through the lens of the HIV. We saw firsthand: the frightening specter of drug abuse and its relation to the spread of the virus; an overly burdened and unnecessarily costly health care system; a drug development system unresponsive to the fast-changing unknowns surrounding this epidemic; absence of integrated health education and health promotion programs in our schools; an increasingly litigious and adversarial relationship between providers and consumers of health care; and a society in which some members were still too quick to reject, deny, condemn, and discriminate, resulting in a situation that neither bodes well for the individual nor the public health when dealing with this epidemic.

"But what we also saw firsthand was the spark of human spirit which rises high when faced with the gravest of human tragedies. We saw incredible goodness across the nation and a fundamental compassion, expressed by thousands of Americans, from health care professionals to hospice volunteers to local firemen, police, and emergency workers. We heard from young people who daily demonstrate personal bravery and integrity in standing up for their HIV-infected classmates who have been victims of the vilest of attacks by bullies inside and outside their schools. We heard from business leaders, community-based organizations, church and humanitarian groups who have refused to succumb to the overload of work placed on them or the same old bureaucratic obstacles thrown in their way at every turn as they move to meet daily living needs of HIV-infected persons.

"We found the HIV epidemic, then, to be much more than a medical crisis or a public health threat. While we found it a grave tragedy, we also saw the HIV epidemic as an opportunity to confront and begin to solve many of the problems our society faces. We saw an opportunity to begin to eliminate flaws in our health care system resulting in a better life for all Americans; we saw an opportunity to begin to educate our young people about their own human biology so that they can better appreciate the unique worth and dignity of themselves and others; we saw an opportunity to begin to eliminate discrimination against persons with HIV infection, as well as persons with other disabilities and illnesses, and embrace them as part of the mainstream of American life."

Many of you in the AIDS Ministries Network have been confronted, at some point, with obstacles which have made AIDS ministries and AIDS prevention education difficult to accomplish. No doubt, you have also experienced moments of unanticipated joy.

Know that you and your work are upheld in our prayers here at the Health and Welfare Ministries. We see in you that which Admiral Watkins described so well: "the spark of human spirit which rises high when faced with the gravest of human tragedies."

Some content updating of this paper was done in October, 1993 and February, 1998.