AIDS Benefit Helps Smaller Organizations

A multiethnic crowd of walkers, runners, skaters and cyclists raised about $200,000 Sunday in the city’s second “AIDS-Thon,” an event designed to help small groups that provide AIDS-related services and to publicize the growing incidence of the disease among blacks and Latinos.

Organizers, who had hoped to raise $300,000, said about 2,000 people completed the 10-kilometer course through downtown Los Angeles, beginning at the Music Center and winding up at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Park, the site of Olvera Street.

Drawing enthusiastic cheers along the route was Chris Patrouch, a 30-year-old transportation planner for the city of West Hollywood, who chose the most unusual mode of the day for showing support for AIDS services. He traveled the entire route on a unicycle.

Proceeds from the event will benefit 25 organizations, many of them little-known efforts such as Aunt Bea’s Laundry, which picks up and delivers laundry for people with AIDS.

“Some of these organizations are threadbare,” said Mark Vandervelden, a spokesman for AIDS-Thon organizers. “They are getting by on voluntary support and bake sales.”

The downtown event was instituted last year after AIDS Project Los Angeles, sponsor of the much more visible AIDS Walk, declined to share proceeds from that annual event with other groups.

The seventh AIDS Walk, held Sept. 22, brought in $2.5 million. Vandervelden described it as “more of a Westside, West Hollywood kind of event” than the “AIDS-Thon,” which featured such entertainment as Teatro Viva, a comedy act that seeks to educate gay and bisexual Latinos about safe sex.

Teatro Viva operates on an annual budget of $3,000 to $4,000, said Mario Perez Ceballos, the group’s general coordinator.

Other beneficiaries of the Sunday event include East Los Angeles Task Force, a 24-year-old organization that provides care to 1,300 substance abusers, many of whom are either infected with the virus that leads to AIDS or are at high risk for contracting the disease; Cara a Cara, a counseling service for Spanish-speaking men; Asian Pacific Lesbians and Gays, which provides AIDS education and referral services for Asian-Pacific Islanders, and the Children’s AIDS Center at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, the largest such facility in the western United States.

Dr. Jonathan Goldsmith, who heads the Children’s AIDS Center, said he is treating 200 children and conducting clinical trials on a thinly stretched $500,000 budget drawn from federal sources and “any dollar I can find anywhere.”

“Children have always been the last in line for things,” Goldsmith said.