The office is cluttered, but colourful, and the staff, while exhausted, are somehow still capable of generating energy and enthusiasm. Welcome to the world of HIV West Yellowhead.

It’s a world of hard work, and a world where the fight against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is nearly equalled by the battles for funding and recognition from the province.

Yet, despite the odds they face and the difficult tasks they must complete, Andrea Watson, Tara Robertson and Les Dolan make sure that it’s a world where hope is far more prevalent than despair.

Watson, the executive director, is philosophical about the challenges she and her colleagues must face on a daily basis.

“We do what we can with what we’ve got,” she said. “It’s just the nature of what we do.”

With responsibility for Jasper, Hinton, Edson and Whitecourt, HIV West Yellowhead has to make do on an annual budget of roughly $70,000. None of the paid staff are full-time, except for Robertson, and this is a recent development. Her volunteer coordinator position has been funded by the Wild Rose Foundation, but this money runs out at the end of the month.

Before she leaves the organization, Robertson is trying to find a group of dedicated volunteers to take over the job. There are about ten regular volunteers they rely on, but HIV West Yellowhead needs some  more committed people who are willing to take on projects like the coordination of a regular group activity for Jasper’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans community. Also needed: a webmaster, someone to run their volunteer incentive program and most spectacularly of all, a “Captain Condom”, someone who will dress as a prophylactic and visit bars encouraging people to have “safe drunk sex,” as Robertson puts it.

While this last position is an important one, it’s important that people realize that HIV West Yellowhead is concerned with a lot more than one virus and one community.

“Going around distributing condoms is far from the only thing that we do,” said Robertson.

Indeed, the staff find that their mission leads them into situations where they deal with drug users, troubled youth, and people facing poverty and indigence.

“It’s high-risk groups from across the board,” said Les Dolan. “You can’t separate any of these things.”

Dolan, the interim sexual health and harm reduction coordinator for the group, is working towards bringing a major harm reduction conference to Jasper in the future. She finds that demand for harm reduction services, which are utilized by people infected with HIV or other STIs, is not very high in Jasper.

“Here we’re all about prevention and awareness, although we can do it (the harm reduction work),” she said. “There are certainly people living positive throughout the region.”

Given that the organization is finding that its work connects to many other issues, it comes as no surprise that HIV West Yellowhead is pursuing partnerships with food banks, native friendship centres and similar service groups across their area of responsibility. Frankly, it’s the only way they can manage to reach these more distant places given their infintisimal travel budget of $2,100 per annum.

One key relationship that the group has been focusing on is a collaboration with the Kimamow Atoskanow Foundation, a provincial organization with a mandate to do HIV-related work on reserves and with aboriginal populations. The two service groups are planning to combine forces to offer services to places as far away as Cold Lake, technically part of HIV West Yellowhead’s area of responsibility.

Of the 15 AIDS service organizations in Alberta, HIV West Yellowhead has the largest theoretical coverage area, stretching north to Red Earth Creek and east to Cold Lake. Essentially, the group is meant to be covering the same area as the Aspen Regional Health Authority. That’s impossible, given their budget.

The organization is part of the Alberta Community Council on HIV (ACCH), which works to oversee the various members and coordinate the disbursing of money from the Alberta Community HIV Fund. There is $3.2 million available every year, a majority of which goes towards the service organizations in the larger, urban centres. These groups also tend to dominate ACCH’s agenda.

Recently, ACCH became concerned that the provincial government was planning to alter the way it distributed AIDS funding, moving it from the community fund and into the health regions. The council began an aggressive public campaign in protest, something that HIV West Yellowhead had very little say in, according to Watson, who is hopeful that the funding mechanism will remain as is. A similar change has been made for cancer and mental health funding, but for now, the local agency is confident that it will survive. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t been taking steps to ensure the work they do will be sustained even if they were to disappear.

“We were trying to link absolutely everything we do to other organizations in Jasper, just in case anything happened to us,” said Robertson.

That sort of connection and support is easier to come by in Jasper compared to other towns in the area.

“This community cares way more than a lot of small towns,” said Watson. “There’s a lot more openmindedness.”

Robertson agrees.

“Sex seems to be a little more taboo there,” she said of other parts of the West Yellowhead region. “The first step is breaking down barriers and finding the people to become our contacts in those places.”

Funding for the agency operates on three-year cycles, and the current one is up in 2007. Watson expects to spend a lot of time this year writing the work plan for the next cycle, and she feels that there is a lot to look forward to for HIV West Yellowhead.

“It seems like we are on the cusp of whole lot of things,” she said. “It’s stuff that slowly moves forward.” 

— People interested in volunteering or learning more about HIV West Yellowhead can call 852-5274 or visit their office, located upstairs in the Clock Tower Mall at 622 Connaught Drive