520 Clinton Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11238
718.857.9445
800.588.6628
neac@neac.org
March 2005
Directors Elected
Four directors were elected at the Annual Meeting of NEAC in New Orleans. The Rev. Helen Morris Havens and Lola Thomas join the board for the first time; Christopher Haley-Walden and Alfredo Macaya were elected to new terms.
NEAC Board members of the class of 2009: Alfredo Macaya, Lola Thomas, and Chris Haley-Walden.
Christopher Haley-Walden, who is co-chair of the NEAC board of directors, is a licensed social worker who is director of programs for No Place Like Home Communities, a provider of supportable affordable housing for people with disabilities. Previously he was director of development for the Minnesota AIDS Project. He is an active member of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Minneapolis and is currently a candidate for Holy Orders to become a permanent deacon. One of his goals, he says, is “to help NEAC to remind the people of God that this crisis is far from over, and we can still use the church’s help in prevention, education, and support.”
In 1977 the Rev. Helen Morris Havens was ordained to the priesthood, the first woman in the diocese, at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Houston, where she was assistant rector; in 1981 when she joined St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Houston, she became the first woman rector in the Diocese of Texas. At St. Stephen’s, outreach ministries have been of major importance. The church had one of the first AIDS Respite Care Teams in Houston and has recently opened a community center to serve all the people in the neighborhood. Out of her concern for the struggles for justice, equality, and peace, the church inaugurated a Sunday evening worship service, “Engaging the Questions,” in which art forms, speakers, music, and prayer are combined to create worship that wrestles with difficult issues of the day. She consented to join the NEAC board as a result of “the experience I have had in HIV/AIDS ministry and the enormous need to stem the tide of AIDS and heal those afflicted by it.
Alfredo Macaya was born in San Jose, Costa Rica, and raised between there and Miami where he was received into the Episcopal Church. He has been very active in many aspects of church life at Trinity Cathedral. He was a founding board member of the Episcopal AIDS Ministry for the Diocese of South East Florida. An interior designer, primarily for hotels, he has been a member of the board of DIFFA, an AIDS awareness and fundraising group for the design profession. Both of these groups, he says, have given him the opportunity to practice ministry to people affected by HIV, as does his service on the board of NEAC.
Lola Thomas is founder and executive director of the AIDS Alliance of Northwest Georgia in Cartersville, which serves clients in 10 counties in rural northwest Georgia with emergency assistance, transportation, food, crisis intervention, support groups, legal assistance, and referrals, and has an extension program of prevention services. Since 1993 she has been a member of the Diocese of Atlanta Commission on AIDS and since 1995 of the Province IV Network of AIDS Ministries, which plans and carries out the annual Kanuga Retreat. She is also a member of the Northwest Georgia Ryan White Consortium and has served on the Georgia Statewide Community HIV Planning Council. She is an active member of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Cartersville, having served as Senior Warden and Council Delegate. She sees service on the NEAC board as a natural extension of her work in hands-on AIDS ministry for over 15 years.
