October 31, 2007

Judith Dillard

Judith Dillard is a hard woman to catch up with—she sits on the board of directors of the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP) and Samaritan House, which provides housing for HIV positive people in Fort Worth. But “sits” hardly captures her active life. It would be more accurate to say she runs back and forth among projects, enthusiastically attacking the problems facing those with HIV. Her advocacy work began in 1990 when her HIV diagnosis turned her life upside down and she went from being a working mother and member of her church choir to being homeless and addicted to crack cocaine. Now, recovered and sober, Dillard is involved in projects that run the gamut from prevention to establishing housing for those with HIV to treatment advocacy. “HIV is my life today,” she says.

Why do you advocate for housing for people with HIV?

My passion, along with HIV prevention for women, is securing housing for people living with HIV. After I found out about my HIV diagnosis, I used drugs and was homeless on Skid Row, in Los Angeles, for about seven years. I know that homeless people on drugs often have unsafe sex—if they need the money for drugs, they don’t care about condoms. These are the things I tell congressmen when I’m in Washington, D.C. It’s hard for people to address substance abuse problems if they don’t have a place to live. So I think housing is important for prevention.

Of course, it’s essential for the well-being of positive people as well. As a woman living with HIV/AIDS, if I didn’t have a place to come home to, to be at peace and at rest, all the stresses of the day would still be on me. Stress is the number one killer of a person with a compromised immune system.

How did you go from being a homeless person to becoming a housing advocate?

While I was homeless and addicted to drugs, I was in and out of AIDS Service Organizations. I would be dirty and stinking, and they would just take me in and hug me. They knew I was HIV positive and a drug addict, but they reached out to me.

In 1997 I was arrested for possession of crack cocaine, and I was given the choice of prison or rehab. I chose rehab, but it was a lock-up facility, so it was basically prison. In rehab, I learned that I wanted to be the person I was before my HIV diagnosis, which was a wife, a working mom who sang in the church choir. My life turned from one extreme to the other when I got my diagnosis.

When I got out of my substance abuse program, I went into a transitional housing program for HIV positive women. For those first two years that I was clean, I was learning how to live in society all over again. Because when you’re homeless, everybody’s your enemy. People cross the street to avoid you, they treat you like a criminal. It’s very degrading. I had to learn how to let people be themselves all over again. During that time I met Cathy Olufs, who worked for Women Alive. Cathy took me under her wing—she drove me to workshops or came to pick me up at three in the morning. She started sending me to treatment advocacy events to represent Women Alive as a positive woman. Finally, in 1999, I started going into churches to talk about HIV.

Then at AIDS Watch [an AIDS advocacy and lobbying event] in 2003 in Washington, D.C., I met people from CHAMP. I was so impressed that these smart people were advocating on behalf of a disease they weren’t even infected with.

How do you use your experience of being a former addict to talk to women?

I know that it’s important to interact with these women on not just a professional level, but a personal level, too. There are so many wonderful women here in the Fort Worth area who are addicted to crack like I was, and I look at it differently than the case managers or the executive directors, because they haven’t been there. I sit on committees to be able to talk for those women, who are being belittled and criminalized by people on the committees because they use drugs and are homeless.

Do you find that people on these committees are receptive to you?

Sometimes. I’ve had a great experience with the drug development committee of the AIDS Treatment Activist Coalition (ATAC)—we meet with the pharmaceutical companies to advocate for drug safety, efficacy, and tolerability. I knew nothing about drug development when I joined this committee three years ago. I’m really a self-taught woman—I didn’t go to college—so I love to get on these committees with HIV positive people with Masters’ degrees and PhD’s. They’re willing to mentor and educate me. I really appreciate that part of working in HIV—having people who’ve had higher education embrace those who have no education.

They, in turn, haven’t experienced what I have; they were on the other side of the fence. They don’t know what it’s like to be homeless and addicted to drugs, and they take my experience seriously.

You work with churches in education and prevention. Why is the church an important place to promote HIV education?

Especially in the black community, the church is the backbone of the whole community. People follow directions from church leaders. I feel that if we can get HIV education in through the church, we could decrease incidence in all communities.

There is a lot of homophobia and HIV stigma in churches. When I go into churches, some people embrace me, and some people still don’t want to shake my hand. If we can get the church to embrace people for who they are, and not who the church feels they should be, I think we could make progress with prevention.

I’m especially concerned with black women. If we don’t see some type of prevention justice in the black community for women, we’re going to be in trouble in the next four or five years. Since the leading cause of death in black women ages 24 to 34 is AIDS—who will bear the children in the black community [in the future]?

Do you reach out to religious institutions beyond those in the African-American community?

I recently went to my first Jewish synagogue and spoke about HIV with people in the 10th grade. It was so empowering for those young people to ask me questions and to be interested in protecting themselves against HIV. I was honored to do that.

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