Project
Angel Heart History
Delivering
meals with love since 1991
In 1991, Charles Robbins returned to
Denver
to find old friends living with AIDS and wasting away before his eyes.
That fall, he founded Project Angel Heart and modeled it after Project
Angel Food in
Los Angeles
where he had been a volunteer.
Charles and a group of friends solicited food from local
restaurants and distributed it on the weekends from their homes.
Our first meal was a pan of lasagna donated by
Racines
restaurant and delivered to six clients. The
agency soon needed its own kitchen. Several
churches turned Project Angel Heart away before St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in
Capitol Hill welcomed and embraced Project Angel Heart.
Our mission was not limited to people living with HIV/AIDS, but included
people with other life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and multiple
sclerosis.
Over the next three years, Project Angel Heart grew
steadily both in the number of clients served and the services provided.
By 1994, Project Angel Heart was serving one large mid-day meal, six-days
per week. Project Angel Heart was
also operating The Center for Living, a drop in center that offered counseling
and support groups.
The next few years proved to be tumultuous for Project
Angel Heart. In 1995, Charles
Robbins resigned from the agency. With
cuts in government grants and no end in site to the AIDS crisis, the board made
two difficult decisions: it narrowed the mission to just HIV/AIDS and it began
the process of closing the Center for Living in order focus on what Project
Angel Heart did best: home-delivered meals.
In early 1996, Project Angel Heart moved to the larger kitchen in Our
Saviorâs
Lutheran
Church, also in Capitol Hill. That move
was just in time. In the fall, the
FDA approved a whole new class of promising drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS
which when used in combination with other drugs, caused the AIDS death rate to
plummet. The result was that more
people than ever were living with HIV and needing services.
In just the spring of 1997, the demand for our services rose by 60%.
Infection rates remained high and the side effects of the near toxic drug
regimens were catching up with our clients.
For others, they had developed resistance to the drugs.
AIDS was also then spreading the fastest in so-called emerging
populations living in poverty or facing other mental or physical medical
diagnosis besides HIV that compromise their ability to obtain or respond to
treatment. The combined result of
these trends was that the demand for our services continued to grow both in
terms of the number of clients and the depth of their need.
We continued to accept all eligible clients while we increased the size
of our main meals and later added a breakfast option for those with no other
source of food.
Seeing the many people living with cancer and other life-threatening diseases
besides HIV/AIDS in need of home-delivered meals, the Board of Directors
declared its intention in 1999 to re-expand Project Angel Heartâs mission to
include people living with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, in
addition to HIV/AIDS. This could not
come to fruition until the agency acquired a larger kitchen.
Just with its existing HIV/AIDS client base, by 2000, we were running out
of room in out church-basement kitchen and we had to resort to a waiting list.
We also could not serve the many clients forced outside of our boundaries
to more affordable suburbs. That
year, however, through a very fortuitous set of circumstances, we discovered an
available kitchen÷big, modern, affordable and easy to clean÷but we had to
raise a lot of money fast to take advantage of a unique opportunity.
Randy Barbour, a long time kitchen volunteer and board member,
volunteered to spearhead the capital campaign to make this new kitchen a
reality. Tragically, Randy was soon
after diagnosed with colon cancer and died in April of 2000.
In his memory, Project Angel Heartâs new kitchen would be named
ãRandyâs Kitchenä.
In late 2000 and early 2001, we very successfully completed a $600,000 capital
campaign, raising over $800,000, remodeled the kitchen and built-out offices.
In the spring of 2001, we moved, immediately eliminated our waiting list
and began to expand our boundaries to the north where we had concentrations of
eligible clients. In the summer, we
acquired equipment necessary to offer our clients the option of receiving a
weekâs worth of meals frozen. By
early 2002, about half of our clients had chosen this option.
We also at long last began phasing in our return to a mission not limited
to HIV/AIDS, but again including people with other life-threatening illnesses.
We never stopped receiving calls from people with life-threatening
illnesses other than HIV/AIDS, and they had nowhere else to turn.
As of early 2002, roughly 30% of our clients were living with a disease
other than HIV/AIDS.
With the frozen meal program and our expanded mission, Project Angel Heart
continued to expand into the suburbs throughout 2002 and 2003, eventually
serving over 700 square miles from the agencyâs pre-2001 135 square miles.
During this expansion, the agency continued to see client numbers
increase, but were also, for the first time, seeing annual meal numbers
decrease. This new trend was due to
the fact that we were serving more seniors and more people living with diseases
other than HIV/AIDS, who generally cannot eat the same volume of food that
people living with HIV/AIDS need. Also
in 2003, the client eligibility that was applied to all new clients in 2001 was
now applied to clients that preceded the creation of that eligibility.
By the end of 2004, 40% of Project Angel Heartâs client
base was over the age of 60 and 70% was living with a disease other than
HIV/AIDS. Also by year-end, 2004,
70% of clients required some sort of modified diet every week such as a renal
diet, no acid, no dairy, bland, pureed, etc. and 82% of meals were delivered
frozen, weekly, as opposed to hot, daily.
In 2005, after undergoing feasibility research and much planning, Project Angel
Heart launched service to people in Colorado Springs. Meals were prepared in Randyâs
Kitchen and delivered to
First
United
Methodist
Church
in Colorado Springs via a freezer truck. Colorado Springs
volunteers then picked up the meals from the church and delivered them to
clientsâ homes. On the first day
of service, 13 people living with HIV/AIDS, cancer or another life-threatening
disease received meals. As of
August, 2005, over 50 clients are receiving meals and 100 Colorado Springs
clients have received meals since service was launched.
