Clare Housing

Home, Health, and Hope for Minnesotans Living with HIV/AIDS

by  Elise Sexton 

Background

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system and makes you more susceptible to illness and disease. If HIV is not treated, it can lead to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), which marks more severe, permanent damage to the immune system. HIV is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) that can also be spread by contact with infected blood, injecting drugs, and sharing needles. It can also be spread from mother to child during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding. Without medication, it may take years before HIV weakens your immune system to the point that you have AIDS. There is no cure for HIV, but  antiretroviral therapy (ART), taking a combination of HIV medicines (called an HIV treatment regimen) every day, can reduce a person's viral load to the point that the HIV virus is no longer detectable in their system and can no longer be transmitted. 

Who is Clare Housing?

Clare Housing is a non-profit organization in Minneapolis that provides long-term housing and other care resources for impoverished Minnesotans living with HIV/AIDS. I found Clare Housing through research into the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Minnesota. Clare started as a small community group housing individuals diagnosed with AIDS during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and 1990’s. They opened the first Community Care Home to provide compassionate end-of-life care in 1987, expanding to two hospice care houses soon after. Since then, Clare has grown to support over 200 residents at several apartment complexes and housing sites around the Twin Cities. Alongside independent housing, Clare also provides in-home nursing care for residents in need, mental health services, and connects residents with other support services. Clare Housing is the largest provider of supportive affordable housing for people living with HIV in Minnesota, with particularly high numbers of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ residents engaged in our services. 


Annual outcomes show that Clare Housing is both ending homelessness among individuals living with HIV or AIDS and is preventing the spread of HIV through the provision of housing. When an individual has stable housing, they are more likely to receive health care, to adhere to their medication regimen, and to be virally suppressed. Virally suppressed people are no longer at risk of spreading HIV to others (known as “Undetectable HIV = Untransmissible HIV” or U = U).  Through every new move-in, Clare Housing has a positive impact on reducing homelessness and stopping the spread of HIV. Their annual goal is that at least 90% of Clare Housing residents are linked to health care, are virally suppressed, and maintain their housing for 12 months or more. Clare routinely achieves all three of these annual goals and is committed to ongoing improvement.

What I Did

During this experience, my primary project was creating a database for quantifying resident outcomes and demographics. This data includes information about age, race, length of time at Clare, and viral load/detectability (U=U). This information is essential in tracking trends in HIV risk factors and comorbidities across Minnesota. Clare Housing also reports these outcomes to sponsors, the state of Minnesota, and to their Board of Trustees. Working with resident data gave me a unique insight into the experiences of Minnesotans with HIV, including instances of discrimination, barriers to care, and quality of life. The most interesting part of this project was my ongoing navigation of how to record and quantify personal information about residents that was often observed and not reported. Because Clare Housing relies so heavily on the relationships of trust between staff and residents, many important data points were confided personally between people and never documented. This “problem” gave me a unique insight into the operations of a community organization as opposed to a larger corporation.


My second project was to create a physical space to store resident belongings and organizational donations. Clare Housing receives a large amount of donations for their residents, including large welcome baskets used to furnish housing units. These donations were supposed to be accessible for residents whenever they needed them, but the storage room for the belongings was unlabelled, unorganized, and difficult to navigate. Donations were going unused and it was difficult for employees to track what donations were needed and which they had plenty of. I sorted all of the existing donations and created a new organizational system to keep the donations room in order. Through Clare Housing, I also gained insight into the ever-changing world of HIV care, specifically the focus on longer-term care and the importance of antiretroviral therapy.

Lessons Learned

Working at Clare Housing taught me about the unique challenges and benefits of community-based care organizations. I saw the close relationships that build between employees and residents, and the direct impact that workers can have on the lives and wellbeing of their fellow community members. At the same time, I saw many of the restrictions of the non-profit model and the negative effects that they can have on workers; Issues such as a lack of documentation of resident information, employee turn-over, and wage complaints were all a part of Clare’s operations. 

References

Elise Sexton

Hello! I am an Anthropology major, Community and Global Health concentrator, and Music minor. I am from Fort Myers, Florida, but I now call Minnesota and the Twin Cities my home! At Macalester, I am involved in the concert choir, the radio station WMCN, and working in the admissions department. I am passionate about LGBTQ+ healthcare and all of the non-medical aspects of wellness, such as housing, food, and mental health care. After graduation, I am planning on working in the Twin Cities. 

Image Credits:

Heading: Haring, Keith. Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death. 1989. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of David W. Kiehl in honor of Patrick Moore. 

Image 1: OpenClipart. World AIDS Day Typography. 2020. https://freesvg.org/world-aids-day-typography

Image 2: Clare Housing. Clare Housing Logo. 2023. https://www.clarehousing.org/.