History

HALSA’s origins began in 1982, at the very beginning of an epidemic that would later be called AIDS. Gay men were dying in Los Angeles hospitals from Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Karposi’s Sarcoma cancers. That year the LA County Bar Association and the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center set up law projects in direct response to surviving same-sex partners who were losing assets and rights to adversarial or estranged families of the deceased partner. The projects focused on reversing this trend by assisting individuals and families with future planning documents such as wills, medical power of attorney, guardianships and insurance beneficiary forms.

By the late eighties, three other organizations had specialized law projects that also assisted people living with HIV and AIDS, including AIDS Service Center, Public Counsel and AIDS Project Los Angeles.

In 1993, two local HIV legal experts, David Schulman, Supervising Attorney of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s HIV/AIDS Discrimination Unit, and Jon Davidson, Senior Attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, urged for independent studies of the local HIV/AIDS legal services delivery system. Gary Blassi, a UCLA law professor, and a nationally-recognized legal services expert, was commissioned to conduct the first study. Blasi’s study reported that local HIV legal services failed to meet legal needs in critically important areas, while providing duplicative services in other areas. He recommended pooling resources of all the organizations to create an entirely new, fully-integrated HIV legal services project. Katharine Krause, a nationally respected legal services delivery expert and former executive director of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, along with an advisory committee of HIV legal experts and community representatives, conducted a comprehensive community needs assessment in 1995. Her report identified critical unmet needs in the areas of employment, public benefits, health, housing, family and immigration law. She also recommended that existing legal services be coordinated through a single point of contact. Both reports stimulated planning among the five existing HIV legal services providers to consolidate services and look for additional funds needed to expand into these new, critically-needed practice areas.

With a larger financial commitment from the L.A. County Commission on HIV in early 1997, these five HIV legal service programs moved into an office together on Wilshire Boulevard and formed a collaborative consortium called the HIV & AIDS Legal Services Alliance.  With more substantial funding and the ability to coordinate programs and strategies under one roof, the alliance hired a director, several more staff attorneys and advocates, and expanded its programs to assist individuals with housing, immigration, public benefits, tax and employment issues.  The consortium also introduced Legal Check Up, a novel one-on-one education project designed to prevent legal problems for newly-diagnosed individuals.

The collaborative transitioned to a single, independent, nonprofit organization in 2001.  The transition allowed HALSA to gain charitable status, raise funds from the private sector and launch educational and public policy programs. As the demographics of HIV infection in Southern California changed significantly in these years, the majority of clients seeking legal assistance shifted to people of color living in poverty.  In response, HALSA sought culturally and linguistically appropriate staff. Today, the majority of our staff are people of color and 40 percent are fluent in Spanish.

With programs bridging three decades, HALSA and its five founding law projects have assisted more than 30,000 households from every neighborhood in Los Angeles and from many cities in Southern California. We have successfully litigated some of the most blatant cases of HIV discrimination, eliminated injustices for the most underserved members of our community, played a role in the development of important legislation, and trained hundreds of individuals on HIV law in Southern California.