Community-Based, Comprehensive Care and Our Clients
Harlem United is a community-based organization providing a unique continuum of care. Click here for our program model.
We integrate socially and economically disenfranchised people into a healthy and healing community. We also offer our clients access to a full range of medical, social, and supportive services. The majority of our clients are people living with HIV/AIDS whose diagnoses are often complicated by addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. Many have also faced significant barriers to care due to poverty, race, HIV status, and sexual or gender identity.
Our “one-stop shop” for services allows Harlem United to treat the whole person—mind, body, and spirit—in a compassionate and supportive environment. Our staff work in partnership with our clients at each stage of care: HIV testing; treatment and education; primary medical care; substance use counseling; mental health services; pastoral counseling; and an array of expressive therapies. Through our comprehensive model of care, clients learn to become their own advocates and acquire a new sense of well-being and independence.
In 2007, we served 3,689 clients. Of these 3,689 clients, *a total of 739 were heads of families with 261 collaterals/family members who were not officially Harlem United clients. However, some Harlem United services benefited these collaterals/family members, too. Therefore, if we include the 261 collaterals/family members in our count, we served a total of 3,950 unique individuals. This represents a 32% increase over 2006.
In addition, through our HIV education, intervention, and awareness programs, we completed more than 33,000 outreach and education encounters during 2007.
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As September is National Recovery Month, we are kicking off an internal Harm Reduction, Recovery Readiness, Relapse Prevention, and recovery Campaign. To that end, we have created a harm reduction blog entitled H(EA)RT: Harm Reduction Talks, where clients can blog about their experiences.
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The Uptown Health Link collaborative aims to maximize HIV service utilization in Upper Manhattan, increase community awareness and solidarity for effective HIV prevention, promote knowledge of HIV serostatus, and link individuals to targeted HIV prevention, treatment and support services.
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We need to put the fight against HIV/AIDS back on the map and the National AIDS Atlas will be a valuable tool in this fight.
The National HIV/AIDS Atlas presents county-level prevalence rates (based on the reported number of people living with HIV (non-AIDS) and AIDS in 2006) in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
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