Kathy Horton is a program manager with the Health Education Resource Organization in Baltimore.  (Newsline photo by Jordan Gilmore)

By Jordan Gilmore
Maryland Newsline
Friday, May 23, 2003

BALTIMORE - Make no mistake; Kathy Horton is a busy woman. Her desk is piled high with paper, her office is cluttered, the phone is ringing off the hook and co-workers are constantly knocking on her door.

Her cheerful and jovial manner, however, belies the obvious stresses of her 50-hour-a-week job.

"I should put a sign on the door that says, ‘Everyone go away,’ " she says with a smirk.

Horton, 56, is a program manager at the Health Education Resource Organization, a federally funded Baltimore support service for people living with HIV and AIDS. She supervises At The Door, a free program intended to ease the transition of HIV-infected prisoners back into the community upon their release.

Horton is one of the few people at HERO who doesn't have a caseload, or a list of clients. Still, in her three years there, Horton says she has befriended many of the people who come to the nonprofit organization's offices seeking assistance.

"I know nearly everyone who's been in the program fairly well," she says. "People here know me."

She leads a group of At The Door clients that meets each week, and sees
many of them on a daily basis.

At The Door, which serves about 30 clients each year, offers a variety of services to former prisoners living with HIV, including life skills classes, housing counseling, drug rehabilitation and job placement.

Before joining HERO, Horton worked with a number of other social services, including a halfway house in Baltimore. Working with HIV patients who in many cases are intravenous drug users, however, was new to her.

"Well, there was this ad in the paper," she begins with a chuckle, when asked how she found her way into the job. "I had really not ever wanted to deal with people who are addicts." But, she adds, "I guess I just got to a point in my life when I was ready to.

"At that point in time, I didn't think I'd do it very long, because this was right before they came out with all the medications and people just were dying. The whole program was based on a short life expectancy for people.

"But then everything changed," she adds.

With the introduction of new medicines that allowed AIDS patients to live longer than just a few months, the role of support organizations like HERO was altered. Clients now needed help finding jobs and housing, and that meant support was no longer limited to hospital care.

"I do an outrageous amount of paperwork," Horton says. Work on grants,
forms, data collection and evaluations takes up most of her day.

Horton says prevention education and outreach are among the cornerstones of HERO's role in the community, in addition to support services for people who have HIV. She says she is shocked by how little many people know about the disease.

"There are so many misconceptions about how you get HIV, it's scary," she says. "We have clients in here who tell us they can't live at home because their mother follows them around with a bottle of bleach."

HERO's other services include legal and mental health services, as well as peer counseling.

"With the kind of support that is available, even just including the resource center, where people can come and hang out for eight hours, we're providing them with just about everything they need," she says.

"The thing people need to know is that HIV is not a death sentence," Horton concludes. "If you're willing to get treatment, it's the same as having diabetes.

"Sure, you can die from diabetes, but you don't have to, and it's the same with HIV these days."

Copyright © 2003 University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism

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