An Evolution of Support for the HIV/AIDS Initiative and More

When Keith McNutt attended a performance of Rent in the mid-1990s, he didn’t expect the stories told onstage to mirror his experiences as a case worker for the HIV/AIDS Initiative.

“I remember hearing the lyrics, ‘Will I lose my dignity, will someone care?’” McNutt said recently. “The words are repeated and repeated, and the pain and terror grows, and it reaches a crescendo of agony. It perfectly described what I was living every day with our clients.”

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has been supporting the life-affirming work of the HIV/AIDS Initiative at the Entertainment Community Fund (formerly The Actors Fund) since the program’s inception in 1988. Before the merger of the two organizations, Equity Fights AIDS provided the initial funding for the initiative and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS continues to provide the majority of its annual budget. Last year, Broadway Cares provided $1 million to the HIV/AIDS Initiative.

In those earliest days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, case management at the Fund ranged from building support systems and “buddy” teams when clients were healthy to writing wills, finalizing funeral arrangements and being by their bedsides for their final days. McNutt and his team would take clients on social trips, as they were often ostracized from their families and struggling with loneliness.

“Even when there was such pain in life, there were also so many opportunities to be gracious in giving,” McNutt said. 

Thanks to the generosity of Broadway Cares donors and supporters, this commitment of compassion has never wavered — even as accessibility to HIV medication transitioned the disease from a death sentence to a manageable condition.

“The care we’re providing changed because now we aren’t primarily going to funerals,” said Kent Curtis, who has been leading the HIV/AIDS Initiative since 2007. “So many of our patients today thought they’d never see 50, let alone 80. Now, our work has evolved into more long-term case management for clients of all ages.”

While evolutions in disease management have shifted the course of the case work, the Fund’s personalized compassion and support is a steadfast constant for its clients.

“The greatest challenge and greatest joy is to understand where our clients of all ages are in the continuum of life, and to help people feel in control enough that they can experience the joys of living,” Curtis said.

In 1996, Broadway Cares expanded its support of the Fund beyond the HIV/AIDS Initiative to provide initial funding to launch the Phyllis Newman Women’s Health Initiative. In 2023 alone, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS awarded the Entertainment Community Fund $7.64 million, supporting the Friedman Health Center for the Performing Arts, the HIV/AIDS Initiative, the Phyllis Newman Women’s Health Initiative, Senior Services, Addiction and Recovery Services, Artists Health Insurance Resource Center, The Dancers’ Resource, The Stage Managers’ Project and a safety net of other lifesaving services.

This expansion of services supports how the HIV case work is enhanced by and operates in tandem with other programs offered at the Fund.

“Nine times out of 10, referrals for new HIV infections come directly to us from the Friedman Health Center right above me, on the 12th floor of this building,” Curtis said from the Fund’s NYC Theater District offices on Broadway. “A case worker heads upstairs, and we give the clients education and emotional support. When younger people in the industry hear they’re HIV positive, their minds go to 30 years ago. We are in a very different phase of the disease, but we help people sit with the information.”

The case workers at the Fund schedule a follow-up appointment. Once immediate needs are met, such as emergency financial assistance or medication, the case workers identify other relevant services based on individual need.

“We’ll help them apply for a grant, and then analyze why they needed that grant,” Curtis said. “Have they not been able to work for a while? Then we’ll connect them with the Career Center for workshops and resume help. Have they been steadily making money but lack a good financial model? Here are financial wellness courses and housing workshops.”

McNutt emphasized that health insurance is also an important aspect of early case management. “We always want our social workers connecting HIV clients to our Artists Health Insurance Resource Center,” he said. “Our health insurance counselors know this industry and how people are in and out of union-based insurance, and can best connect them to resources.”

McNutt, who currently serves as the director of the western region at the Entertainment Community Fund, started his tenure at the Fund in 1996. Since the earliest days, his work has been powered by a desire to give back to the community that has given so much to him.

“The only way I kept my sanity, coming out of the closet in a small town in Ohio, was from people in the arts,” McNutt said. “I got through by listening to Motown music on my little AM radio and watching TV and movies. Once I got to the Fund, it clicked that this was the place I needed to do this work because I had such gratitude for creative people in the world.”

Since that first funding in 1988, Broadway Cares’ donors and supporters have helped ensure more than $140 million have sustained and helped expand the programs of the Fund. Broadway Cares remains the single largest financial supporter of the safety net of social service programs at the Entertainment Community Fund.

“I don’t know that there’s ever been a partnership in the history of medicine or social work that has stepped in so completely as Broadway Cares has with the Fund,” McNutt said. “Because of that profound support and this vital partnership, we were able to create services that could meet the needs of our community. And that remarkable work truly saves people’s lives in the darkest moments.”

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Support for the Entertainment Community Fund by Fiscal Year