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The agency was founded in 1993 in response to the HIV care needs of Atlanta’s highly stigmatized and low-income communities by a group of Atlanta area mental health providers who believed that Atlanta needed a community-based agency dedicated to the HIV-related mental health needs of individuals living with HIV and their affected partners, family members, friends and caregivers. The founding board members made a commitment to enhance the capacity of the metropolitan Atlanta HIV services infrastructure by providing training and technical assistance to other agencies to help them better respond to the mental health needs of their clients. Direct services to Caucasian men who have sex with men (MSM) clients began on April 1, 1993.
In 1994, the agency received funding from Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS (HOPWA) to provide mental health case management to homeless people with HIV. This program was designed to assist clients with accessing the services needed to maintain housing, stabilize their lives, and then begin utilizing mental health services. Many clients also needed psychiatric support, including assessment, prescriptions, and assistance with medication adherence. In response to this identified special need, the agency established the psychiatric assistance program in 2000.
In 1998, the agency formalized its training commitment to issues of diversity by establishing the Cultural Diversity Institute, an extensive and comprehensive two-day workshop that is presented on, at minimum, an annual basis. The Institute works in collaboration with mental health professionals in the community to better enable mental health service providers to address the increasingly complex cultural issues associated with this disease.
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