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GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) — When health care professionals hear about Higher Ground at national meetings, they always tell those connected to the day respite for people infected and affected by AIDS and HIV that they wished they had one in their community.
"If you try to recreate it, you probably couldn't," said Addison Ore of Triad Health Project, which runs the program. "This was 'the miracle that happened on Bessemer Street,' and we keep it going.
"Mark keeps it going," she said of executive director Mark Cassity.
For the past 18 years, Cassity, 55, an English major and introvert, has helped cultivate a ministry of loitering at the nonprofit — where a warm hand across the lunch table might fill a need for someone — in a community of people of every faith and no faith. On an average day 35 people might come walking through the door looking for services, with others who might send an email. More than 2,000 people with HIV/AIDS live in Guilford County, according to 2013 statistics, the most recent available from the state Division of Public Health.
Fundraisers, such as Sunday's annual Winter Walk for AIDS and Inaugural Ron Johnson 5K Run, help keep the doors open.
"It makes a bad day good, to come through those doors," said one man at the center who has been living with the AIDS virus for more than a decade.
On paper the work at Higher Ground is to provide HIV/AIDS services, which involves fighting stigmas, educating loved ones and encouraging people to be tested for HIV/AIDS. It is a nonprofit advocacy and education program of the Triad Health Project with a $65,000 annual budget and heavily dependent on the churches that prepare three weekly lunch meals and others who sometimes drop off necessities such as toilet paper.
It is a tightly knit community of people whose "client" and "volunteer" labels fall off at the door of a house in the row of upper-middle-class homes and businesses.
At a memorial a few years ago, so many people attended that they spilled out of the house onto the wide Southern porch as they came together to mourn James McNair, one of their own, who had gone into the hospital the weekend before with AIDS and other complications. McNair was an ambassador of sorts for the house, and often spoke out in the community.
Inside, they flopped onto the floor and the cushions of the couch and seated themselves across the piano bench and kitchen chairs that had been brought into the large, open living room.
"I already knew I was going to lie," Ore said at the time of how HIPAA, the medical privacy law, stood in the way of her, Cassity, and another friend getting into the ICU to see McNair, who was an ambassador of sorts at Higher Ground.
A nurse asked if they were related to McNair, who was African-American.
"Are there three whiter people?" Ore said to those in the room listening to her story, some laughing and wiping away tears at the same time. "I could feel the breath coming out of Mark and Ben."
The house shook with laughter that day.
Cassity, who was there at the time, still savors the memory of that gathering, which is telling of the community being built here.
Seated with them was the young mother from Irving Park, the recovering crack addict, the clergy and nonreligious, and the former interns who flew in from across the country for the funeral.
They were rich, poor and of varying ethnicities and even political labels. Around them, crayon artwork and smiling faces snapped with a camera's lens jockeyed for space in nooks and crannies from room to room, even suspended midair by clothespins on a line.
"It wasn't a lie," Cassity said this week, of getting in to see the man, who never recovered. "We really are family here."
As Cassity spoke, a small group discussion was taking place nearby.
"I smile even when I'm torn up inside," one middle-aged male participant said. Then he talked about the diagnosis and how it affects him daily.
The others nodded.
"It's like, walking through the door is an admission things didn't go as planned," Cassity said later, away from the group. "You don't have to wear a mask here."
The story of Higher Ground precedes Cassity by years and vision. It has its roots in the Guilford Regional AIDS Interfaith Network, a group of clergy in Greensboro in the early 1990s who wanted to be a healing force for people dealing with AIDS and HIV.
People carrying an AIDS or HIV diagnosis were often ostracized and feared.
"I took on an idea, and it was that the religious community had to be engaged in the AIDS crisis, instead of what we were seeing," said Sallie White, GRAIN's first executive director, who lost lots of friends in the early epidemic.
White worked out of West Market Street United Methodist Church, one of the organizing churches.
The group of clergy paired small groups of parishioners with someone with a diagnosis and became their surrogate family.
But the organization had no physical home for programs and support groups. White spotted an empty home in a neighborhood she thought was perfect for Higher Ground.
"I went to (businessman) Bob Page, and I said I understand you own this house on a street and in a neighborhood where we could offer a place of community and people would feel comfortable being there," White said.
Page let the group move into the house on Bessemer, free of charge.
White, the only employee, spent much of her time writing grants, training volunteers for the care teams — there were more than 400 members — and growing services.
"I was juggling so many balls that I could not be the person at Higher Ground that could just be there all the time with people and ... be that guiding force," White said.
When the group began looking for a program director, a lot of interest came from clergy and people with a social service background. Cassity was neither, but he needed a job and saw an ad in the newspaper.
"It was clear right from the beginning that his heart was what was needed there," White said. "I knew it when I met him."
He was spiritual, sensitive and empathetic to people whose lives didn't go as planned — his had not.
Cassity had been fired from a publishing job while battling clinical depression.
About the same time, with four years in the trenches, White also told her board she had about a year left in her as executive director.
"They felt like we had sort of fulfilled our mission to be a catalyst for the community," White said.
She went to Sam Parker, then director of the Triad Health Project, which is supported by the United Way, various grants and individual donations.
"I said I need to make plans for Higher Ground, so I can leave and know that its purpose remains," White said. "He said, 'We'll take it under our umbrella.'
"I think it became a jewel in their crown."
When White left, Cassity took on the title of executive director. He was a young father in his 30s, with daughters in grade school — Molly, now 23, taught school in France for a year and is now exploring India; and Liza, now 28, lives in New York and is a publicist for a book publishing company.
"People say, 'You were called to this,' " Cassity said. "I tried to go to other places, I just didn't fit. I felt like I washed up on the door step, and they let me in."
Those who work with Cassity or come here for the free lunch or just to "be" tend to use the same words to describe Cassity.
He is a listener. Understated but powerful when he speaks. Engaging. Somebody who has worked hard to make Higher Ground a place of acceptance and understanding for those still struggling with society's fear of AIDS.
"I think Mark has a really good grasp on how precious life is, and that whole idea of living in the present moment and understanding that any minute things can change," said his wife Anne Cassity, an art director.
He is empowering — partly by design and partly because of resources — with volunteers and clients taking active leadership roles. Mostly, he wants them to cross paths with people they might not otherwise know.
Former Elon University student Britten Pund came to Higher Ground to do research on a paper about HIV stigma and discrimination in 2004 and never really left.
"James (McNair) really wanted people to understand that everyone was a person, not a diagnosis, not a circumstance," said Pund, who is now working with a national AIDS health care and advocacy group in Washington, D.C. and recently visited with her toddler. "Higher Ground changed the course of my life."
Cassity's role might change by the minute — the friend, the resource guy, the executive director when there is unacceptable behavior.
Cassity recalls the woman with HIV who took 12 years after getting the diagnosis to work up the nerve to actually walk through the front door.
For decades, health educators have pointed out that the disease cannot be passed through casual contact, yet the stigma is "soul crushing," he said.
"I still hear, 'My mother doesn't think I see her go into the bathroom with the Clorox after I go in there.'"
At Higher Ground, people have a place to go, and they can look into another set of eyes that may know what they are talking about, Cassity said.
Triad Health Project board member Robin Dorko recalls a young man in his 20s who had been born with HIV. He found Higher Ground after his best friend had died of AIDS. He had stopped taking his own medicine.
"Some of the men here (with the same diagnosis) started talking to him and encouraging him, and he credits this place with learning to live again," Dorko said.
Dorko and Cassity emphasize that it is not a utopia.
People come in horribly sick and "criminally poor," who have been thrown aside by the system, Cassity said.
"Some days I want to be anywhere else but here," he said of the realization of what he can't do for them.
Most days, he wouldn't be anywhere else.
Pat Gibbons of Beacon Place, which provides end-of-life care in a home-like setting, has seen Cassity sit at the bedside of someone from Higher Ground. Sometimes, he's the only person.
"Mark certainly doesn't assume the role of a family member, but he assumes the role of being with them on their journey," Gibbons said.
The work can be emotionally and physically taxing. Cassity meets monthly with a small mission group that includes board members for emotional support. With her shoe-string budget, Ore, the Triad Health Project executive director, has tried to be creative over the years and offer him time off to go to a retreat or even to play golf on a Thursday afternoon.
"It took me years to remind myself that I'm allowed to be happy," Cassity said. "With all of this, I'm still allowed to go home and be grateful for my wife, and love her, and to do things that are frivolous and fun. It really takes a conscious reminder of that."
And he has no plans of retiring.
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Information from: News & Record, http://www.news-record.com
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