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More than 40 years into the epidemic, these efforts serve as a powerful model for how communities can mobilize to build new structures when formal systems fail — demonstrating how regular people created cutting-edge services, delivered these services within local communities, and cared for each other amid collective grief and loss. By examining these histories, this symposium highlights critical lessons for contemporary social work in the context of health and humanitarian crises, emphasizing the importance of centering community expertise in generating knowledge and forming innovative systems of care.
The first paper presents a case study, highlighting the AIDS Memorial Quilt as a site of participatory practice. Findings from a thematic analysis reveal that, by serving as a medium through which community members processed grief, memorialized those lost, and engaged in political advocacy, participants transformed individual trauma into collective, public action.
The second paper draws on data on over 100 oral history interviews with former members of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the world’s first HIV/AIDS service organization. This study reveals the formal and informal emotional support services that frontline careworkers developed to support each other as they confronted the crisis, enabling regular people to continue this work in a time before contemporary frameworks for understanding burnout.
The third paper utilizes mixed oral history and archival research methods to examine the necessity, benefits, and consequences of professionalization within formerly grassroots HIV/AIDS service organizations, with GMHC serving as a case study. As the crisis evolved and organizations increasingly prioritized the hiring of credentialed professionals, this paper examines the organizational implications of abandoning their improvised, community-led models of service delivery, as well as the personal ramifications for volunteers who performed this work without formal training.
The fourth paper examines how former HIV/AIDS activists re-mobilized in the 21st century to create quarantine shelters for unhoused people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Highlighting findings from a qualitative study, this paper underscores the ways in which a legacy of innovative, community-led crisis response was re-engaged to creatively address a contemporary public health emergency.
Together, these papers trace the evolution of community-led crisis response across time, highlighting both its transformative potential and the tensions introduced through the increasing institutionalization of such services. The discussion will consider how contemporary social work can draw on these histories to center community expertise, sustain collective forms of care, and more effectively respond to ongoing and future crises.