You can find the ARE here: https://aidsresponseeffort.org

Transcript:

Linda
Hi, and welcome to Episode number 31 of the spectrum. This was recorded on November 5th, right? Today’s the 5th?

Katie
Yes.

Linda
November 5th, 2025. Today we’re here at the R.I.S.E Center of the ARE in Winchester, Virginia. And we’re going to be talking to folks that work there and learn about what the ARE and R.I.S.E. Center is. So let’s start with you, Katie. What’s your role here at the ARE?

Katie
Well, my name’s Katie Vance. I’m the executive director of ARE.

Linda
And Matt?

Matt
My name is Matt Buracker. I am a non-medical case manager at ARE. And I am also the co-director of the R.I.S.E. Center.

Linda
So let’s start with some basic things. What is the ARE?

Katie
So ARE stands for AIDS Response Effort. We’ve been around for, it’ll be 35 years next year. We are an AIDS service organization. So we provide medical and non-medical case management for individuals living with HIV. We also have a testing program. So we do HIV, STI, and hepatitis C testing and linkage to care. And then a few years ago, we had a housing program for the general public. And we made a decision that it didn’t make sense for us as an agency to continue providing that. So we worked hard to transition that program over to Horizon Goodwill. And in its place, we opened the R.I.S.E. Center, which is an LGBTQ+ center.

Linda
Let’s talk about the medical side of things for a moment. What sort of services does the ARE provide?

Katie
So in a typical year, we would provide medical and transportation, copay assistance, dental assistance, food pantry assistance. What else is on our list?

Matt
Psychosocial support.

Katie
Yes.

Matt
Dental, vision.

Linda
So you’re not actually providing those services, but connecting people and helping people afford those services. Is that correct? Is that correct?

Katie
We are currently in a budget cut. And so we are providing medical case management and continuing to support people in the best way that we can. We received a few different grants to be able to provide some copay assistance so that people can get their medical care taken care of and to cover our food pantry. But currently we are just providing the opportunity for people to connect with our medical case managers, stay connected to medical and non-medical case managers and make sure that they are remaining adherent to their meds.

Linda
Matt, you said you did non-medical case management. So that’s the sort of thing that you do?

Matt
Yes.

Linda
If someone were to come here for help, what would that process be like?

Matt
So we do an eligibility process for clients that are seeking services, which would require certain documents and criteria to access our services, like proof of residency, proof of income. Once eligibility is determined, they would be connected to a medical or non-medical case manager. The way that works is there’s different tiers and levels of need. So medical case management is level two and three. So someone that may be newly diagnosed or never been in care before that needs a little bit of extra support and non-medical case managers, you know, the ones that have been living with HIV, they don’t have a ton of needs, but may need help getting medication or maybe have food insecurity and need access to our food pantry. So they’re lower level of need, but the need is still there. And that’s how we determine the tiers.

Linda
About how many people do you support right now?

Katie
We annually, we support about a hundred people. And that’s different people every year, just depending on whether or not they’re utilizing our services. So I’d say there’s probably about a hundred to 115 clients that we serve with our case management program.

Linda
And if somebody wanted to get in contact with you, how would they do that through your website?

Katie
Yeah, they can just go through a website or they can call us. Most of the people that we have come in and use our testing services, and then they are referred to care immediately if they do test positive, but they can call our main line or they can reach out to any of our medical or non-medical case managers in the office and we will get them through the eligibility process.

Linda
How did this R.I.S.E. Center come to be?

Matt
As Katie said, previously we used to offer housing programs for the general public, and it got really tricky because we’ve always been an HIV services organization and it really felt like we were running two separate nonprofits. So we did a lot of internal work and lots of behind the scenes planning and deciding, you know, who are we? We had a little bit of an identity crisis. Are we a housing agency? Are we an HIV service agency? We were essentially both. And then we decided to, after many, many discussions and many years of planning, we decided to transition our housing programs over to a housing agency because that just made more sense to us. The R.I.S.E. Center came to be. We had some questions about why is an HIV agency opening an LGBTQ center because we don’t want to add to the stigma of queer people and HIV. And we know that they are very separate issues, but we felt that it’s irresponsible to talk about one without the other because of the huge impacts that HIV has had on the queer community. And we’ve been supporting the queer community from the very beginning.

Linda
And what is the very beginning? How long has the ARE been around?

Katie
It’ll be — so we’ve been an official organization as of 2026. It’ll be 35 years. Before that, We were just a group of volunteers through Valley Health that were providing support needs from folks who were essentially dying from AIDS related illnesses and providing a buddy system, care, support, time with people, clothing, food, things like that. And we have grown from just a volunteer, a group of volunteers to a full blown agency that’s been around for 35 years now.

Linda
That’s amazing. Yeah. How much community do you see in the area? Obviously you saw the need for a center. So there must be at least here at Winchester, a fairly large community. What’s your assessment of that?

Matt
Yeah, we’ve had nothing but positive support and all of our events, our social events and support events have had new faces almost every time. We work really closely with a social and LGBTQ social group, Rainbow Ridge Social Club, and they are a social group in the Shenandoah Valley. And I think they have close to a thousand members. So there’s definitely a need and a lot of community here. We just decided that we needed a space.

Katie
They held a first event, which was a Friendsgiving before we even opened or tore down the walls in this building. And they expected 10 people to show up. They had 50 people show up at their first event. And we’re very excited that we were opening this space. And so it just goes to show that it’s been needed and wanted in the community.

Linda
Yeah. What’s the footprint for the R.I.S.E. Center? What areas do you serve?

Linda
So right now our agency as a whole, AIDS Response Effort serves the entire Lord Fairfax Health District. Right now the center covers Winchester and Frederick County, but we will serve anybody who comes through our doors.

Linda
For people that aren’t familiar, like me actually, what is the Lord Fairfax Health District?

Katie
Frederick County, Winchester, Clarke County, Warren County, Front Royal, Shenandoah County and Page County.

Linda
Okay. So that’s a pretty large area.

Katie
It is a large area. It’s hard to, we always joke. We always leave out one county when we’re saying it. So yeah.

Katie
How long has this space been open?

Katie
This has now been open since our official opening date was June 30th of 2025. So it’s been open almost six months now.

Linda
What sorts of things happen here?

Matt
So we have a food pantry and we have a LGBTQ resource library that has almost a thousand books. It’s really impressive. We keep it in our vault because this is an old bank building. So that’s kind of a little play on words. We have a gender-firming clothing closet downstairs. We have several support affinity groups. So we have affinity groups for different spokes of the queer umbrella. They’re kind of a mix between social and support groups, trans and non-binary. We have an ARO/ACE group, a polyamory group, different groups for different identities. We have a lot of social groups as well. We have monthly gatherings for like game nights, Dungeons and Dragons meetups. We have a stitch and bitch, which is one of my favorites. Coffee and coloring every other Friday. So just events that let get people in the door and show them that the support is here and to meet people.

Linda
And that all happens right here in this space. Matt Yes.

Linda
When we look at the kinds of turnout you get for these things, 2025 has been a challenging year for the LGBT+ community, especially the trans community. What’s your impression of how people are handling these attacks? I know that you’re a 501(c)3 and non-political, but I’m just talking about how people are reacting to this and how the center supports them in that.

Matt
For the affinity groups and jump in if I’m wrong, we don’t monitor them per se, a staff member is available on site, but we let the groups meet as their own being so that they have the safe space to talk freely without concern that someone might be listening. So I don’t have a lot of feedback from the different groups, but I know that they our trans and non-binary group is one of our biggest.

Linda
Oh, you mentioned the library. So how does that work? Does somebody come in and browse through your library and they just check out a book like at a regular library?

Matt
Yes. All of our books are donation based. Everything, everything here has been funded through donations. We don’t receive any funding for the center. The library is available anytime we’re open. We’re open Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 5 Anybody can come in and check out a book. Books are typically checked out for a month at a time. And we have different topics, different age ranges everywhere from baby books to young adult nonfiction to adult fiction, nonfiction. Our library team has worked really, really hard to make sure that there is different books for different identities and that everybody’s covered.

Linda
That sounds pretty amazing. What do you see as the biggest challenge for your organization going forward into 2026? Obviously you mentioned that funding has been an issue. Is that your biggest issue for the future?

Katie
A hundred percent. Funding right now has just been cut at the state level. There are rebates that the Virginia Department of Health used to receive that they’re not so much receiving anymore. And so we received a big cut to our Ryan White program, which is our HIV case management program this year. And we’re expected to receive more cuts. We don’t know what the government shutdown will do in terms of whether or not we’re able to draw down funding. It’s our understanding that we’re able to draw down for the rest of the grant year, but that ends in March. Other programs are being cut across the board and it’s not just our agency that’s being cut. It’s other agencies in the city of Winchester. I mean, there’s over 300 nonprofits in this community and with SNAP benefits being cut, our local food pantries are being overrun and a lot of our clients use those and there is just a lack of funding available to support the community as a whole. So I think that’s our biggest issue. And I would say that the attacks on trans people is the other biggest issue that we are facing. And of course, we’re not a political organization. We’re a human service organization. We care about the humans who come through our door and the impact on the people we’re serving, I think, is very heavy. And we are just trying to provide as much support as we can right now. And we just we are interested to see what the next year will bring.

Linda
If I’m understanding correctly, a lot of the budget cuts have been because of federal cuts that have then come down to the state level and then down to us.

Katie
Not quite yet. So our current cut that we’ve received out of our Ryan White Medical Case Management Program is based on rebates that the Virginia Department of Health used to receive through a pharmaceutical company, I believe. And those rebates were cut. And so as a result, a lot of the funding to agencies like ours was cut significantly. Some agencies received 100 percent cut and had to close their doors across the state.

Linda
I see. So it’s not just a federal issue. It’s happening at the state level.

Katie
It’s happening at the state level, too. I’m not even sure how federal funding cuts are going to impact us yet. So, yeah.

Linda
With that in mind, how can people support the ARE and the R.I.S.E. Center?

Katie
I mean, I always say money. Well, I think we need funding. You know, we excuse me, we employ at least 11 people at our agency right now. We’re working on hiring two more and so keeping our doors open in order to provide the services that we provide and that are very crucial to the community. For example, our STI testing staff can test anyone for free in the community, even if they don’t, they’re asymptomatic and aren’t showing any symptoms. Whereas if they go to their local urgent care, most places, most insurances will not cover STI testing without symptoms. And so they actually send folks to us to get full panel STI testing. And that’s really needed in our community. People need to know their status. They need to understand that and have important conversations about sexual health in our community. And these impacts trickle down to everyone in our community. So I would say money is the most important thing. But food pantry donations are the next one. We don’t ask any demographic information for our food pantry. Anyone can come in. So we’re asking people to please bring in any non-perishable food that they’re willing to give out to our community. Clothing closet donations are important as in Virginia is a huge employer of federal workers who are now currently not working and looking for places to supplement resources. And our clothing closet is going to be one of those places. Book donations. And what else can you think of? Volunteer time. Yes. All of our programs are volunteer led. So if anybody is seeking volunteer opportunities, our website has our volunteer application and that would come to us and we hold monthly volunteer meetings the third Wednesday of every month. Wednesday of every month. So that is a time for new volunteers to come and get oriented with the space and learn more about the program and also for existing volunteer groups to get together with their teams and work on projects and overall projects for the agency. Yeah.

Linda
If someone wanted to donate, they can go to your website and donate money that way. And for physical things, they can bring them here to the R.I.S.E. Center. Yes. What question haven’t I asked that you think is important? Matt, put you on the spot first.

Matt
We talked about the food pantry. We talked about the closet, the library, the affinity groups.

Linda
For the affinity groups, someone just looks at the schedule and says, “I’m going to show up for this.” They don’t need to register or anything like that.

Matt
No registration is required. All of our groups are posted on our website. We have a calendar on our website as well as on our social medias. Everything is on Facebook and Instagram. Just show up. No registration required.

Linda
And now that I’ve derailed your thought process.

Katie
No, I mean, I think that’s important to note because people don’t want to share their information necessarily if they’re joining those groups. And so I think it’s important to know they can just show up.

Linda
Katie, is there anything that you think we haven’t talked about that’s important?

Katie
I want to mention our prevention programming that I didn’t mention. So we have a comprehensive harm reduction program, which is in our community. And they work specifically with people who inject drugs and they hand out sterile syringes, Narcan, wound care kits, safe use supplies, jackets, gloves, hats. They have a van that goes into the community and that’s a really cool program. They also do rapid HIV and hep C testing on the van. And so that’s been a great community. We have a PrEP program and the PrEP program is through MISTR. PrEP is the preventative medication for HIV. And so we recommend that folks in our community get on PrEP and we can provide some of the testing for that and the support to take that medication and use that medication. And we also do condom distribution in the community to prevent transmission of STIs and HIV. So.

Linda
Great. Well, thank you both so much for your time. Matt & Katie: Thank you.

Linda
And I hope we can drum up some support for your organization.

Matt
Thank you.

Katie
Thank you.

Matt
Thank you so much.

Katie
Yeah.