Hi everyone,
We’d like to share the following information with you about last Thursday’s Poz Café event. Since
not all the volunteers from the sponsoring congregations have email,
please share this report with the volunteers from your group. You might
want to consider including a report in your congregation’s bulletin or
newsletter.
We have included some photos from the event. If you would like more, please let me know.
Thank you all for your participation in making our March Poz Café luncheon a success! Caring congregations and organizations putting their faith in action and sharing love and great food!
With support from March’s fantastic sponsoring congregations, we were able to serve 131 people at this month’s event! That’s a 13% increase over last year’s March Poz Café. This
number includes people living with HIV, their guests, congregational
volunteers, and TIHAN volunteers and staff. The March lunch buffet
featured Salisbury steak, buttered noodles, sautéed zucchini and squash,
tossed garden greens, dinner rolls with butter, and homemade chocolate
devil’s food cake. We celebrated with a St. Patrick’s Day theme, with
many volunteers dressed for the occasion.
Some highlights from this month:
With assistance from our partner agencies
Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest and
COPE Community Services, we provided transportation to over 6 CarePartners and guests who otherwise may not have been able to attend.
We distributed 75 Care Packages, decorated bags filled with toiletry items, to our CarePartners living with
HIV/AIDS. The sponsoring congregations donated all of the products to
use in stuffing these bags. Thanks to Our Mother of Sorrows for the
festive decorated bags they contributed.
The
St. Patrick’s Day theme was complete with Our Mother of Sorrows’ fabulous table centerpieces.
With assistance from the staff at
St. Francis in the Foothills,
we were able to project a slideshow continuously throughout the event
that depicted a 2013 TIHAN year-in-review. Additionally, during our
announcements we recognized the outstanding Poz Café volunteers,
educational speakers, Excellence in Caring volunteer nominees, and
Models of Empowerment nominees who received certificates and recognition
at our recent Annual Meeting. The CarePartners and guests in
attendance at this month’s Poz Café, many of whom helped nominate these
individuals, got to see the faces behind TIHAN’s Care and Support
programs and applaud these fantastic volunteers.
Finally, many CarePartners received generously donated
gift prizes by winning BINGO or the raffle.
And
of course we can’t forget the great meal and the hugs and the “safe
space” that you help create at Poz Café every month, enabling our
CarePartners to meet others living with HIV, increase their social
support, and know that there are caring people from faith communities
who welcome them and are working to end the stigma that still exists.
Our sponsoring congregations brought 15 congregational volunteers to help this month, at least 3 of whom were joining us for the first time. Thank you all for your willingness to help!
Our regular TIHAN volunteers did a great job of helping the
congregational volunteers have an experience of learning and serving.
Each month, we survey the congregational volunteers, and the March responses are below. (10 of the 15 congregational volunteers completed all or part of the survey this month.) The survey results were positive and will assist us in future events.
We would also like to share a few comments from congregational volunteers that really speak to the atmosphere of the event:
The best part of Poz Café was:
“All the great people I met”“Very well organized”
“Everything!”
Special Mention
We want to thank our Poz Café 101 Educational Hour speakers for their volunteer time:
Linda
relayed the history of TIHAN and the story of the Poz Café monthly
event, and taught basic information about HIV and AIDS so that all of
our congregational volunteers were prepared to serve with a common level
of knowledge about these issues.
Jeffrey shared
his personal story of living with HIV and becoming part of the TIHAN
community, placing Linda’s educational facts into a real-life context. Our
Poz Café 101 team hopes you enjoyed the educational hour and feel
well-informed to outreach within your communities and continue the
mission of decreasing the stigma of those living with HIV/AIDS.
The congregational volunteers arrived en masse and were ready to prepare the meal and hall for a
fabulous lunch and afternoon of compassion and connecting with people
living with HIV. We appreciate the energy that was generated and all
the fellowship that our volunteers provided to our CarePartners.
Special thanks go to congregational coordinators
Beverly Mahl, Laura Stehle, Consuelo Lucero, Deacon Ralph Taylor, Dianne Gundersen, and
Father John Smith for
all their efforts in planning, shopping for food, collecting Care
Package and raffle/BINGO prize items, and organizing the congregational
volunteers. A special thank-you also goes to out to the clergy in
attendance, in addition to those who served as coordinators:
Reverend Vicki Hesse and
Monsignor Thomas Cahalane volunteered with their congregations. Thanks so much for joining us!
We
hope you had a great time, and if you’d like to volunteer with Poz Café
more than the once a year that your congregation sponsors the event,
please contact us at 299-6647!
Having started with just a handful of people at those first luncheons so many years ago, Poz Café is now the largest regular gathering place for people living with HIV in Southern Arizona! TIHAN is 100% privately funded and counts on people like you to continue this program, and all of our work.
If you or someone you know would like to make a financial donation to help support Poz Café and keep this program operating,
your contribution is greatly needed, and appreciated! Make a donation now and write in the “memo line” of your check that it is for Poz Café (or CLICK HERE TO DONATE to make a secure online donation.) And
please encourage your faith community to make a contribution to keep
TIHAN operating. The economy has affected all of our faith communities,
our CarePartners, and TIHAN; but we have
faith that you can help us sustain our programs. We cannot continue
this work without the financial support of our faith communities and
volunteers.
Please help advocate for funding for TIHAN in your congregation and in any way that you can do so.
Thanks again for your support of Poz Café, and for making so much possible through TIHAN!
Poz
Café is made possible in part by donations from compassionate
congregations and individuals of TIHAN, along with funding from Rincon
Congregational United Church of Christ, St. Francis in the Foothills
United Methodist Church, and the Sundt Foundation. Support for
transportation is provided by Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest
and COPE Community Services.
Deirdre Demers
Program Manager
Tucson Interfaith HIV/AIDS Network (TIHAN)
2660 N. 1
st Avenue
Tucson, Arizona 85719
(520) 299-6647
www.tihan.org
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Most of the CarePartners living with HIV/AIDS who receive support services from TIHAN are people whose household income is less than 150% of the federal poverty level.
Because of this, the State of Arizona now allows TIHAN donors to take advantage of the working poor tax credit.
Your donation to TIHAN could reduce personal income taxes owed to the
state of Arizona by up to $200 for individuals and $400 for those filing
jointly (if you itemize). In essence, a donation to TIHAN of up to
$200 (or $400 for married couples) may have no cost to you the donor,
since you might pay that much less in taxes if you are eligible for this state tax credit.
We want to insure the proper upkeep and maintenance of this fine
instrument for generations of worshippers to come. To this end, we will
establish “The Alan F. Schultz Endowment for the Organ.” Our initial
goal will be $120,000. Quietly, we already have received over $14,000
in cash and over $30,000 in pledges toward the goal. We have $76,000 to
reach our goal.
