It hardly seems like 20 years for Lauren Aaronson, when she looks back at the project she helped spearhead at Congregation Beth Torah. But two decades of Sundays have gone by as congregation members have provided Sunday dinners for the residents of SAVE Home.
SAVE Home, part of SAVE, Inc., is an eight-bed facility that began as a hospice for local people with HIV and AIDS who were being turned away from other facilities. Advances in medicine have made the place more of a transitional housing stop than the real end of the line.
“(The 1990s) was a time when they were being evicted from their apartments and losing jobs because of their diagnosis,” said Aaronson, who has served on SAVE Home’s board twice and finished a term as president of the board in December.
The clients of SAVE, Inc., now include people with other problems, such as mental disabilities and substance abuse issues.
Aaronson got involved in 1992 when she was chairing Beth Torah’s social justice committee. The committee was looking for a way to help people with AIDS and canvassed the local organizations and charities who had related programs.
According to Aaronson, the committee was looking for an opportunity to help that was “beyond writing a check.”
SAVE Home organizers mentioned that people brought dinners to the facility on different nights. Because it’s often difficult for people who work all day to have dinner ready to take somewhere at 5 p.m., the committee asked if Sunday night was taken.
“They said, ‘Nobody brings anything on Sunday nights — isn’t that church night?’ And we said, ‘Not for us,’ ” Aaronson said.
She brought the first dinner, with another congregant, on May 9, 1993, and has remained the project coordinator ever since.
Every few months, she sends around emails with the available dates and asks members of the congregation to sign up. What makes it an appealing volunteer opportunity, Aaronson said, is that people don’t have to commit to a regular slot.
“People can do this once a year or once a month,” she said. “I think that’s what keeps it going — it’s not a major commitment for anyone. People don’t burn out on it.”
Volunteers bring a meal to feed the eight residents and the staff member on duty, and Aaronson encourages the volunteers to stay and eat with the residents if they can.
It’s not always possible, especially since the residents have compromised immune systems. If Aaronson has a cold, she just drops off the food and doesn’t stay, so she won’t risk getting the residents sick.
Over the years, there have been a few times when someone’s forgotten or when a Jewish holiday falls on that night, but Aaronson tries to give SAVE Home advance notice when she can.
“It’s a labor of love. When the AIDS epidemic came to public knowledge, it touched my heart,” Aaronson said. “I was really committed to try and do something, and it resonated with others in the congregation.”
Although she does have friends who have been affected by HIV and AIDS, she said her drive to help came before she knew of those situations. As a research nurse and a professor at the University of Kansas School of Nursing, she had an inside view of the situation from the medical community and understood the hardships people with the disease were facing.
“I knew at the time, if I was working clinically, I would be volunteering to work on a unit (dealing with HIV and AIDS). I could not tolerate the rejections people were experiencing,” she said.
Some cases of the time stuck with Aaronson, like that of Ryan White, a child with hemophilia who developed the disease from a blood transfusion and was shunned by his school community in Indiana.
It bothered her to see how even some medical professionals didn’t want to be around people with the disease because of the pervasive fear surrounding HIV and AIDS.
“That’s just the kind of thing that pushes my buttons,” Aaronson said. “I wanted to be able to be there and help others who are dealing with a very unfair situation.”
One of the reasons she encourages families who volunteer to stay and eat is to provide some normal dinnertime conversation for the residents and help them feel like part of the community.
“The stigma associated with HIV and AIDS is not what it was, and sometimes those of us who are well immersed in the (medical) community aren’t sensitive to the fact that the stigma is still there for many people,” Aaronson said. “I hope, in some respect, (this project) can serve as a way to educate more people.”