People living with AIDS often are completely penniless just a few months after their first opportunistic infection. Those people who had jobs are no longer working. Once they are not working, they lose their access to health insurance. To qualify for Medicaid, a person has to have almost no money and no assets. As a result, in New Jersey more than 50% of people living with AIDS are homeless, not because they're bums, but because there is no way for them to survive financially. Many live on the generosity of family and friends or kindly strangers with an extra room, basement, or garage.

Once a person living with AIDS hits the financial disaster they have to achieve in order to qualify for Medicaid, they can then use the absurdly overcrowded clinics and get minimal health care. The bankrupt and certifiably poor and disabled person living with AIDS can then also qualify for Social Security Disability Income, which is based on a fraction of what they were earning when they became disabled.

If, after a person living with AIDS hits rock bottom financially or that person becomes hospitalized for a month or two, s/he loses what little s/he may have left. Many people are released from hospitals directly to the streets, shelters, or to the kind of near homelessness that they left when they were hospitalized. So if they actually get into a subsidized apartment or room somewhere, they have none of the personal or household supplies they need, and they cannot afford to purchase them.

Obviously, people living with AIDS need help if they are going to survive. But most people are resistant to seeking out charity. Your help with supplying the things people living with AIDS need could make a real and meaningful difference in their lives.

Collect food for people living with AIDS

If you or your congregation are not involved in a food bank, please consider collecting canned and packaged foods for people living with AIDS. (If your congregation is already involved with a food bank, please skip to some of the other action steps below.) Focus on easy to cook food with a high nutritional content, preferably low in salt and fat but high in calories. Cans and packaged foods last a long time, which may be helpful as you develop a distribution system. Fresh produce, breads, milk products and meats would be great, but first you have to be able to come up with a sure way to get them into the hands of the people who need them before they spoil.

The following is a list of suggestions of some of the kinds of foods you might collect, based on suggestions compiled by the AIDS Interfaith Network of New Jersey. It's far from exhaustive. The best rule is, if you'd buy it for yourself, if you find it tasty and nutritious, it's okay to buy for a person living with AIDS.

Canned vegetables
Canned and bottled juices and drinks
"Ensure" or other dietary supplement drinks
Instant breakfast drinks
Brand name cereals
Rice-a-roni meals in a box
Canned or dry soups and bouillon (avoid high-sodium soups)
Hot cereals in single serving packets
Coffee (ground and instant)
Hot chocolate in single serving packets
Sugar, salt, pepper, other spices
Dry packaged pasta and bottles of pasta sauce
Canned meals (Spaghetti Os, Cup O' Noodles, etc)
Canned fruit
Macaroni and cheese
Crackers (all kinds)
Raisins
Peanut butter, jellies and jams
Fruit rolls/fruit snacks
Nuts
Cookies
Rice (all kinds)
Beans (all kinds)
Herbal teas
Jello & instant pudding
Canned tuna (in water)

Please Do Not Collect:

Canned meats (too much salt and fat)
Canned pie fillings or cranberry sauce (may clean out your closet, but is of little nutritional value to people living with AIDS)
Home canned items
Anything which will not keep on shelves for a month or more
Out of date or opened packages

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Adapted from Being A Blessing: 54 Ways You Can Help People Living With AIDS by Rabbi Harris R. Goldstein. Copies of the full publication can be obtained by calling the Alef Design Group at 1-800-845-0662.