The Retired Grandma Who Transformed HIV Care in Her Community

In 1985, America was in the midst of scrambling to figure out how to tackle AIDS. It was the year that Ronald Reagan was finally forced to publicly acknowledge the disease; the year of the very first International AIDS Conference; the year Rock Hudson died, leaving $250,000 behind to set up the American Foundation for AIDS Research; and the year a soft-spoken grandma named Ruth Brinker decided something must be done to assist people with HIV in the community.

At the time, fear around AIDS was at an all-time high. Time magazine published an article in August 1985, documenting the confusion and panic that was gripping communities nationwide. Subjects in the piece included a funeral home that refused to dress a three-year-old who had died from AIDS, firemen suddenly wary of performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and a 13-year-old hemophiliac named Ryan White who was excluded from his Indiana middle school after contracting the virus from a blood transfusion.

Time reported: “The issue of whether or not AIDS can be transmitted through saliva remains medically unresolved and a focus of fear.”

Ruth, a San Francisco resident, was acutely aware of these issues. After finding out that a friend of hers who was living with AIDs was also suffering from malnutrition, she took it upon herself to make sure he had regular meals to eat. At first, Ruth was a one-woman operation, making food in her home kitchen for seven neighbors in need, and delivering it in an old VW van.

“It was my very first experience with AIDS,” Ruth explained in short documentary, The Ruth Brinker Story. “I was absolutely shattered to see how quickly [my friend] became unable to take care of himself. And I began worrying about all the other people in the city who I knew had AIDS and wondering how they were fending. And I just felt compelled to start a meal service for them.”

Ruth’s response made sense. She had long been a volunteer with Meals on Wheels and, in the mid-1980s was managing a chapter of the charity. But because recipients of Meals on Wheels were required to be over the age of 60, she knew it could not help the vast majority of AIDS patients in San Francisco. A dedicated new meal service was badly needed. Project Open Hand (POH) was born.

As word spread about Ruth’s good deeds, it became apparent that demand for the new service was too great for her to handle at home. After receiving a $2,000 donation from the Zen Center, Ruth found seven volunteers to assist her. A few months later, Ruth received another, much-needed, $2,000 from the Golden Gate Business Association.

”I did the cooking and preparing with one hand, while doing Meals on Wheels with the other,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 1987. “All this takes determination and I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of it. When someone gets out of a hospital skeletal and in a few months has put his weight back on and tells you, ‘You’ve saved my life,’ it’s a good feeling.”

Ruth continued, “We use all fresh vegetables, no processed foods. I think I’m serving some of the best food in town. It’s how we show the guys we care.”

In addition to Ruth’s organizational abilities and overriding sense of determination, one of the keys to the organization’s early survival was the support of LGBTQ venues and groups (including the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus) that pitched in with regular fundraisers. Often the approach to raising money was exceedingly scrappy.

Tom Nolan, POH’s executive director once told SF Gate: “The epidemic was just raging out of control. She’d have people literally go to the bars at night and pass a hat around and then go buy potatoes.”

Between 1986 and 1988, the nonprofit’s budget swelled from $70,000 to $1 million. Ruth once told Time magazine simply, “You have to go out and beg.” In much the same way that Ruth had never envisaged having to so regularly persuade people to give her money, she also knew that the majority of the patients POH was serving never dreamed they would need charity to survive.

“They were executives, architects, computer programmers; they have lived a nice lifestyle,” she once recalled. “Then they run out of money and wind up in a ten-dollar a night motel. It’s very hard for them to ask for help — sometimes they wait until they’re nearly starving.”

By 1987, POH was operating out of the kitchen at Trinity Episcopal Church, aided by five chefs, several paid kitchen assistants, a sandwich maker, one driver, two vans and scores of volunteers including Ruth’s daughter, Sara. In 1987, Ruth also received an award from the National AIDS Network in acknowledgment of her efforts. The honor was effective at raising the profile of Project Open Hand. This led to assistance by philanthropist James Hormel, a $125,000 donation from Chevron, a $50,000 grant from the city for new kitchen equipment and a move to larger headquarters with a 4,000-square foot kitchen. By then, the extra space was desperately needed.

A year after the move, Ruth confessed that towards the end of POH’s time operating out of Trinity, “people were peeling potatoes and carrots in the halls, and making sandwiches in the vestry and the choir’s robing room was our computer department.”

Once in their upgraded headquarters in the Mission District, with the help of 100 volunteers’ eager helping hands, POH was able to make and distribute over 2,000 meals a day, still propelled by Ruth’s simple idea that food is love.

POH’s speedy growth was evidence of how great the need for the service was. By 1989, POH was serving patients across the Bay in Alameda County. That same year, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the project provided food to tens of thousands of residents whose houses had been destroyed. Meals were delivered to the East Bay via BART and sheer force of will.

By 1998, POH was also serving seniors all over San Francisco. Two years after that, its service expanded to people living with a variety of debilitating diseases, cancer, diabetes and heart disease included. Ruth oversaw the expansions at every stage — a monumental task after a life already lived to the full.

Ruth first moved to San Francisco in 1955, having been born in South Dakota in 1922. Two years after arriving in the Bay, Ruth married her husband Jack and went on to raise two daughters. After her 1965 divorce, Ruth owned and ran an antiques store near Ghirardelli Square, and always encouraged her children to be openminded.

“She took my sister, me and a friend to the Avalon and the Fillmore, just to see the lights and stuff,” Lisa told Medium in 2021. “I got to see Janis Joplin when I was ten years old.

“I guess that was kind of her role, to be like a mom figure and a helper,” Lisa continued. “And so with young people getting AIDS, or even pre-AIDS, a lot of them had been rejected by their families and even disowned. She was a good listener, and good person to talk to.”

Today, POH is still thriving, providing an astonishing 2,500 meals and 200 bags of groceries per day, day-after-day, thanks to the tireless efforts of both dedicated staff members and the 125 volunteers that continue to share their time and love. Today, the organization relies on federal funding, a variety of grants and, yes, public donations to survive. Its continued success has inspired the founding of similar organizations around the world.

Ruth Marie Brinker died in 2011 at the age of 89, after enduring a series of strokes. Most of her ashes were scattered at Golden Gate Park’s AIDS Memorial Grove. The outpouring after her death was enormous.

“I have walked in the Pride Parade with many, many contingents,” attorney Bill Ambrunn said, “including with popular elected officials and celebrities. But it was never like the experience walking with Ruth as part of the POH contingent. All along the parade route, you could hear people crying out, ‘We love you, Ruth. Thank you, Ruth.’ People clapped and cheered enthusiastically for the tiny little lady waving from the car. They knew her and knew her story and loved her. Even if they didn’t actually know her, many of them knew people she helped care for.”

Ruth remained modest throughout her life, regardless of the appreciation she received from others.

“I always try to do things that need to be done,” she told The Noe Valley Voice in 2006. “It seemed to me that this needed to be done, and I did it.”

For stories on other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, click here.