Running AIDS Walk : Non-Gays Play Important Roles in Fund-Raiser

As the new executive director of AIDS Walk Orange County, Elizabeth Parker went to San Francisco last summer to observe that city’s walkathon and meet leaders of other walks from around the country.

Many of those leaders, either gay or backed by powerful gay organizations in their communities, were surprised by Parker: a heterosexual, 5-months-pregnant school board member from conservative Orange County.

“They all just dropped their jaws,” Parker recalled.

Non-Gay Organizers

While other AIDS walk groups--about a dozen nationwide--are seeing increased participation by concerned heterosexuals, the walks remain largely the domain of gay communities and AIDS-related organizations. Among organizers and volunteers in the Orange County effort, Parker is pretty typical. The county’s gay community strongly supports AIDS Walk Orange County, but the walk’s organizers are predominantly non-gay. They have worked to involve the county’s conservative, heterosexual majority, and they have done it with the crucial support of key Republican figures including county Supervisor Thomas F. Riley and state Sen. Marian Bergeson.

“I knew this walk had to reflect Orange County as a whole,” Parker said. “There was no way you could put on an AIDS walk in Orange County as they do in other places. It wouldn’t work.”

Parker’s formula of broad-based community outreach--”the BB word,” she calls it--has brought financial success. The first walk last year included 1,800 participants and raised $113,000 to fight acquired immune deficiency syndrome, more than any other AIDS-related fund-raising event in the county. And more than 4,000 people are expected to attend Sunday’s 6.2-mile walk in Irvine, which organizers say could raise upwards of $300,000 through donations pledged to walkers.

The walk starts at 8 a.m. from University and Culver drives and will proceed around Mason Regional Park.

The organization has also been successful in reaching heterosexuals. Parker estimates that 70% of the walkers at last year’s event were heterosexual--a far higher proportion than at other cities’ AIDS walks, she said.

Cori Lopez, 26, of Orange said she will walk in Sunday’s event because AIDS is affecting all of Orange County.

“Not a day goes by when I don’t read about it in the paper,” Lopez said of the disease. “It’s out there and it’s happening and it’s something we all have to try to prevent. I don’t consider it a homosexual disease.”

The origins of the Orange County walk, like its foundation, are broad-based.

‘Just Floundering’

Arlene Sontag, a politically active Republican, had been at a Los Angeles fund-raiser two years ago, on the same day as that city’s AIDS walk. She said she was stunned when someone mentioned that the Los Angeles walk had grossed $1 million.

“Something kept nagging at me as to why L.A. should be making all this money,” said Sontag, president of the board of directors of the South Orange County YWCA. “The communities in Orange County, gay and non-gay, were looking to do something (about) AIDS and were just floundering.”

Sontag, who also sits on the board of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange, a gay political group, called together a few friends, gay and straight, and began planning Orange County’s AIDS walk. After casting about for advice--and getting it, they got down to work. In May of last year, Aids Walk Orange County hired Parker, a political consultant and a former top aide to Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, as its executive director. Cathy Winthrop was hired as associate director. Both positions, which are salaried, involve about five months of full-time work each year.

Sontag said there was no conscious decision to hire heterosexuals. “We invited resumes from everybody, gay and non-gay,” she said, “and it just turned out that Liz and Cathy were the most qualified.”

From the start, the county’s gay community has been involved with AIDS Walk Orange County. Gay men and women make up half the organization’s 32-member board of directors, and they form a large bloc of volunteers. Posters publicizing Sunday’s walk also are displayed in the county’s dozen or so gay bars.

‘Very Representative’

“They’ve been very inclusive of the gay community,” Dan Wooldridge, a founder of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange, said of walk officials. “This is a very representative project.”

But Parker and Winthrop were convinced that their effort would go nowhere without mainstream support. So they began recruiting political leaders to lend their names and support by sitting on an honorary advisory committee. Parker knocked on dozens of doors and said she was rebuffed more than once.

Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), who opposed last year’s walk, said Friday that he is reserving judgment about this year’s event because he has questions about the groups that will benefit from the walk’s proceeds. He said the walk’s two largest beneficiaries last year--the AIDS Services Foundation and the AIDS Response Program--”are run by the homosexual organization in Orange County.”

“If the proceeds of this activity will be exclusively given to the Red Cross or the University of California for research, I’d be happy to support it,” Dannemeyer said.

Gradually, though, Aids Walk Orange County assembled an advisory committee of several dozen heavyweights. In addition to Riley and Bergeson, the group includes California’s U.S. senators, Democrat Alan Cranston and Republican Pete Wilson; Thomas H. Nielsen, vice chairman of the Irvine Co.; UC Irvine Chancellor Jack W. Peltason, Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach) and Irvine Mayor Larry Agran.

Riley, a conservative and a former Marine Corps general, said he weighed the political risk of supporting such an event in Orange County. But he resolved that “this is a tremendous health issue. I decided it was my responsibility to take a stand on this.”

After the advisory committee was in place, Parker set about blanketing the county with posters and cardboard displays promoting last year’s walk, which at the time was several months away. Her most difficult task, though, was finding corporate sponsors for the event.

Again, she knocked on dozens of doors. Most executives, she said, “would look at me and say, ‘This is a wonderful thing you’re doing, but it’s not my problem.’ ”

A year later, corporate attitudes remain largely unchanged, Parker said. Still, a few companies have come around and supported the event, including the Pacific Mutual insurance group, and UCI provides office space for Aids Walk Orange County. Coors Distributing Co., a local subsidiary of the beer industry giant, printed up the walk’s posters and promotion cards. Company drivers and sales staff have distributed them throughout the county.

“My experience is that this is a very giving community,” Sontag said. In that sense, she added, “this has not been an impossible thing to do in a conservative county, not at all.”