In the week since I bicycled 300 miles from Boston to New York and completed Braking AIDS Ride 2013, I’ve been bogged down in the usual, overwhelming post-ride wash of feelings—elation, love, gratitude, sadness, achiness (emotional as well as physical), exhaustion, bliss—and in catching up with regular daily life. (The latter, I confess, pales in comparison to the ride experience at the moment.) It remains close to impossible to try to convey the experience of the ride itself, which is far more of a journey than even the daunting physical 300-mile route suggests.

That being the case, it’s unsurprising that the ride leaves something of a chaotic upheaval in its wake. Each year, I find the ride’s aftermath—re-entry to a life without either the demands or the satisfactions of day-to-day training and fundraising—to be discombobulating. That shift too is hard to capture fully, as is the confusion elicited by the sudden change in my focus and emotional intensity. Still, the photo below of my living room, taken by my wife Jen the day after the ride, gives a pretty decent indication of what the first 5 to 10 days after Braking AIDS Ride looks and feels like, literally and metaphorically:

Jen, commenting on our living room after we got home from closing ceremonies: “It’s like Braking AIDS 2013 just blarfed all over our apartment.” Photo courtesy of Jennifer L. Anderson.

As a result of all that tumult, internal and external, I haven’t been able to land for long enough to do a proper post-ride recap. One thing I can and will say right now is that even though this is my fifth Braking AIDS Ride, the experience of it is different and transformative in new ways every year, which is one of many reasons I keep going back. I had a physically challenging journey this year, but not in the ways I expected, and those obstacles and detours led me to rich places and feelings I haven’t had before on the ride. I plan to write more about the ride experience itself in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I wanted to send word on the fundraising piece of the ride.

I am thrilled to report that as of September 29, 2013, Braking AIDS Ride 2013 raised $250,000 net for Housing Works.

As of September 29, 2013, Braking AIDS Ride netted $250,000 for Housing Works. Donations can continue to come in for the 2013 ride through the end of October: http://bit.ly/ZGvJZl.  Photo courtesy of Gant Johnson.

That $250,000 total is all thanks to the support of my dear friends and family who have been such generous donors to my ride efforts, and to countless others like them who contributed to the fundraising of other riders and crew members. They are my heroes, in the truest sense of the word, and all the donations and well wishes from every single one of them are what make the continued crucial advocacy and services that Housing Works offers possible. It is their good will and commitment that enable Housing Works to keep fighting the good fight in pursuit of the end of AIDS.

To those heroes who supported me this year and to the friends and family who were unable to contribute financially but who offered much-needed love and emotional sustenance: Thank you. Every time I think of the notes of encouragement so many of you sent, of the calls and voicemails, and yes, of your boundless financial generosity these past five months, I feel the way I did on Day 2 of this year’s ride when this photo was taken:

Me, on Saturday, September 28, 2013, celebrating near the end of Day 2, over 200 miles into the 300-mile ride, somewhere along the Connecticut coastline. Photo by Alan Barnett.

Because I am both a wordsmith and something of a data geek, I have taken the liberty of doing some analysis, including some arithmetic number-crunching, in order to break down and illuminate what that $250,000 fundraising number means beyond the monetary one-quarter of $1 million total:

• “As of September 29, 2013” refers to the fact that donations and matching gifts can continue to come in for Braking AIDS Ride 2013 until close to the end of October. That means 1) if you haven’t donated but would still like to, you can at http://bit.ly/ZGvJZl and 2) the final amount raised for Braking AIDS Ride 2013 will be calculated sometime in November and obviously will be higher than $250K.

• To put that large $250,000 net figure into greater perspective: The 2013 ride consisted of 106 riders and roughly 60 volunteer crew members. Riders need to meet a fundraising minimum for the event, but crew members do not. That said, many of our amazing crew members raise money anyway.

• Last year, the ride pulled in over $221,000, so this year’s Braking AIDS Ride 2013 total represents a 13% increase ($29,000 more) over 2012.

• My contribution toward that $250,000 total, as of this writing, comes to $13,185. And that figure also may go up to $15,240 if the matching gifts from my own company go through. (We have a new owner and a new set of HR policies, including a matching-gift program. Technically, according to the program’s guidelines, Housing Works should qualify for matching gifts, but despite repeated attempts, I have been unable to get confirmation on that. With the help of many of my colleagues, I have been diligently sending in completed matching-gift forms anyway, and I made another phone call to the powers-that-be this morning. Stay tuned and fingers crossed.)

• The $13,185 I raised was made possible by over 150 generous donors, all of whom are listed below. They inspire me and have all my gratitude.

• Through the help and generosity of those 150+ donors, I achieved just shy of 132% of my original fundraising goal, which was already an ambitious $10,000. My typical beginning goal in past years has been $5,000.

• This $13,185 represents the most I’ve ever been able to raise for a single Braking AIDS Ride, even exceeding the $12,500 I was able to raise back in 2008, when I was a first-time rider and the sheer fact of me attempting such a Herculean physical undertaking was an astonishing novelty to everyone who knew me.

• Contributions to my ride efforts this year ranged in size from $20 to one mind-blowingly generous $1,000 donation. The average donation totaled at about $100. No doubt about it: Every dollar counts, and each and every donor helps make it happen.

• The majority of the amount I raised this year came from individual donations—just over $12,000—with an additional $1,150 coming from corporate matching gifts. (That latter figure will increase to $3,205 if my company’s matches come through.) If you donated this year and forgot to see whether your company has a matching-gift program, please check with your HR department today, as if there’s still time to process these gifts and doing so can double your already generous contribution to Housing Works. My hope is that for future rides, I’ll be able to find more donors who are able to maximize their contributions through a corporate gift program. The paperwork is a minor nuisance and most HR departments don’t make it easy to even discover whether the company has a gifts program, what kinds of donations qualify, and what you need to do to process a gift for a company match, but as this year’s stats show, it is worth being persistent in finding out. Those matches add up.

• Over $2,000 in donations came from my McGraw-Hill Education friends—colleagues, authors past and present, and work-based outside vendors and freelancers. That impressive sum does not include the possible matching gifts from MHE’s parent company. In addition to being stellar people to work with, these individuals are kind and magnanimous. Those who work with me in my Midtown office are also mostly nice enough not to make too much fun of me when I commute from Brooklyn by bike and show up to work in cycling gear.

• Most of my donors are individuals, but I was also surprised and grateful to receive generous support this year from several local businesses in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I believe in using my own consumer dollars to support high-quality businesses that give back to the community—and it goes without saying that, in addition to being good samaritans, all of these organizations are fantastic in terms of the primary goods and services they offer—so I want to give a particular shout-out of gratitude to the following spots in and around South Brooklyn (Cobble Hill; Carroll Gardens; Columbia Street Waterfront; Red Hook):

• Woofs ‘n Whiskers, a dog-walking business and “urban cat and dog retreat,” run by the big-hearted folks who have been caring for our dog Sadie for over a decade.
• Elite Fitness Studio, my excellent neighborhood gym, where locals at all different stages of athleticism and fitness can feel supported and stay motivated.
• The JakeWalk, a warm, welcoming Carroll Gardens restaurant and bar owned by the same folks who have brought us Stinky Bklyn cheese shop and the Smith & Vine and Brookyn Wine Exchange wine shops. Now that I am done with the ride and no longer in hard-core training mode, I plan to frequent all these establishments again with relish.
• Papél Brooklyn, which, for those of you who have ever received a written missive, or gift-wrapped from me and exclaimed “what great packaging” or “what a perfect card/postcard/stationery design, is on my list of favorite paperies (and that’s a very short list, too).

• Surprise donors, old and new, come through every year. The lesson this year, which I seem to keep re-learning, is that one can never be 100% certain who will be able to give or when, just as one doesn’t always know how many people’s lives are affected by HIV or AIDS. Parts of my donor base change every year and not always in predictable ways. For example, some people who gave in 2008 and then didn’t for my 2009, 2010, and 2012 rides returned as donors this year. Likewise, people I’ve solicited for all five years I’ve done the ride and who never donated before now gave for the first time this year. But these two statistics from this year especially blow me away: Nearly one-third of my donors this year were brand-new, a particularly moving figure when one takes into account the fact that I did not experience any of the life changes that often result in a significant expansion of my social network and a broader potential new donor pool—a new job or a move to a new city, for example. The flip side of that fraction leaves me dumb-founded with gratitude: Over two-thirds of my donors—that’s over 100 kind souls—are previous donors of at least one of my five Braking AIDS Rides, and many of them are people who have donated all five years I have done the ride.

• Three donors, two of whom I am lucky enough to call family, made me cry when they wrote me to say they were each contributing a second donation this year.

• The $13,185 my 150+ heroes helped me raise puts me in the #5 spot for individual fundraising for Braking AIDS Ride 2013. You guys rock.

• This 2013 $13K+ total also means that since 2008, I’ve raised over $50,000 in the fight to end AIDS, averaging at $10K per ride event coming from between 80 and 150 donors each year.

In spite of this post’s focus on money and financial results, I also want to emphasize to all my donors that your dollars are doing far more than paying for critical services and programs, though they are most certainly doing that. You are saving and improving lives in an immeasurable, spiritual way, not just a physical one. The emotional and spiritual toll that HIV, AIDS, and homelessness all take on a human being cannot be diagnosed using any medical test or shaped into concrete statistics to use for a jaw-dropping graph or fancy infographic. But it’s there nevertheless. No one describes that toll better than Housing Works President, CEO, and co-founder and fellow Braking AIDS rider Charles King, who spoke during our opening ride ceremonies and shared with us some remarks he made last month at a roundtable meeting on the end of AIDS convened by UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. He also included these same remarks again as part of a longer presentation called “Ending the AIDS Epidemic in New York State and Around the Globe” that he made in Montreal at North American Housing and HIV/AIDS Research Summit VII on September 26, the day before the ride began (and the full text of that presentation can be found here):

For too many years, we have insisted on treating HIV as a biomedical event, when in fact it is a biosocial phenomenon.  That is to say, that while HIV is indeed a virus, it is a virus that is driven, as we all know, by social violence, which is why it largely has spread through the most socially and economically marginalized members of our communities and wrecks even more poverty and marginalization in its wake, at a very great cost. 

We pay lip service to this phenomenon through our talk of key populations.  But we persist in largely biomedical and individualistic behavioral responses.  In order to end the epidemic, with or without a vaccine, we need structural interventions that address the social drivers of this disease.  To date, with the exception of vulnerable children and orphans, and pieties about human rights, we have resisted this approach both because of the attenuated nature of the causal links and because of the supposed financial or political cost of the required interventions.

In fact, we have to recognize that these key populations represent the nexus between the goals of ending poverty and ending AIDS.  It is not so much new money we need.  It is targeting our development dollars at the right people, both to eliminate poverty and to stop transmission of the virus, and taking seriously the commitment to human rights.  Structural interventions, properly applied, can serve not only to keep millions of HIV+ people in care and ultimately virally suppressed, but they are also an effective prevention strategy.

I believe I am on solid scientific and economic ground for my case, being neither a scientist nor an economist.  But the Baptist preacher requires me to speak not just of science and economics, but also to the human condition.  You see, when I speak of the cost of social violence, I am not just speaking of the economic cost or the disease burden.

Think about what it means to be subjected to social violence.  Homelessness not only deprives you of the means to organize your existence, it deprives you of your very dignity.

Not being able to feed your children not only deprives them of essential nutrition, it signals that you are not fit to be a mother.

Being unable to get a job because you are an obviously gay man or a transgender woman not only deprives you of a livelihood, it says you have no value to offer society.

Hiding from punitive laws because you are addicted to drugs or survive by selling sex not only forces you underground, it destroys your sense of self-worth.

We talk about living well as both a measure of disease control and of economic development.  But social violence not only spreads HIV and poverty, it destroys one’s soul.  We will not end the devastation of AIDS until we allow those who have been impacted to reclaim their most sacred part, their very souls.

That is what ending AIDS is most about.  Not just stopping a virus, but allowing people who have been cast to the margins to reclaim their place in our communities and in the world.

[emphasis mine]

With that, I have one final, simple message for my many benevolent donors: Please don’t ever doubt the impact and the ripple effect of your contributions to this cause. In being part of this fight to end AIDS and homelessness, you are doing more than helping people in need survive. You are helping them to live. Thank you again, all of you, for all you do.

My Braking AIDS Ride 2013 Heroes

Jessica Abel & Matt Madden*
Chris Anderson & Mel Stupka*
James Anderson & Suzy Turner*
Jennifer Anderson*
Renée Anderson*
Anonymous* (4 donors)
David Anthony*
Tansal Arnas*
Kate Asson
Janis & Dave Auster*
Jennifer Baker*
Paul Banks
Leah Bassoff*
Charles Baxter*
Jon Bierman*
Deirdre Birmingham
William Bish*
Claire Brantley
Aviva Briefel
Kelly Burdick*
Steph & Bill Carpenter*
Jess Carroll & Sharon Glick*
Stephanie Carroll
Lynne Carstarphen*
Carnegie Corporation of New York†
Clare Cashen*
Betty Chen*
David Chodoff*
Danielle Christensen*
Laura Coaty*
Susan Conceicao*
Barbara Conrey*
Janet Corcoran
Nancy Crochiere*
Anneliese & David Daskal
Joe DeIorio & Thos Shipley
Nicole Dewey & Bill Seely*
Carol Diuguid*
John Dunn
Christie Duray
Mariamne Eliopoulos*
Elite Fitness Studio*
Julie Englander*
Rachel Falk*
Michael Fisher
Terence Fitzgerald*
Timothy Fitzpatrick*
Jimmy & Chris Flavion
Ray Flavion*
Kory Floyd*
Kerri Fox*
The Well-Placed Word
David Gifford & Svenja Leggewie*
Michael & Nicola Gillespie*
Rebecca Gilpin*
Goldman Sachs†
Google†
Susan Gouijnstook*
Penina Greenfield*
Dawn Groundwater*
Amanda Guinzburg*
Scott Harris*
Karen Henry*
Chris Herrmann & Joseph Lorino
Frank Hopp*
Tom Hyry*
The JakeWalk
Andrew Janke
Andrea Vaughn Johnson & Eric Johnson*
Kristopher Kelly
Laura Kennedy
Elizabeth King
Judith Kromm
Debra Kubiak
Jon Lowy
Sylvia Mallory
Matt Martin
Derek McNally*
Dave Meier*
George Meyer*
Michelle Misner & Jason Baluyut*
Richard Monreal
Lorraina & Ben Morrison*
Susan Muller-Hershon
James Murdock
Elizabeth Murphy*
Liz O’Brien*
Eva & Tom Okada*
Jacob Okada*
Stephen Okada
Michael O’Loughlin
Papél New York
Gregg Passin*
Anne Paterson
Nancy Perry*
Lisa Pinto*
Eileen Pollack*
Mary E. Powers
Kirstan Price*
Catherine Groves Ramsdell
Josie Raney*
Jessica Bodie Richards
Rhona Robbin*
Greg Romer*
Stacy Ruel*
Mike Ryan*
Carla Samodulski*
Danielle Scaturro*
Terri Schiesl*
Duane Schrader
Roger Schwartz*
Brian Seastone*
Samantha Shaber*
Jane Smith*
Janet Byrne Smith*
Fred Speers & Chase Skipper*
Lynn Stanley*
Katie Stevens*
Carylanna Taylor
Jeannine, Bil, Kade & Jack Thibodeau
Matt Trokenheim & Jen Simon*
Woof ‘n Whiskers*
Kelly Villella*
Sherry Wolfe*
Yu Wong*

† matching gift