FYI - New York Buyers Club Summer 07 Newsletter +

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http://newyorkbuyersclub.org/supplement/index.html

New York Buyers' Club Mission Statement
The New York Buyers’ Club is a nonprofit, membership-governed organization dedicated to providing therapeutically significant nutritional supplements to people with HIV, hepatitis, and other chronic illnesses. Through research and education programs, it brings to its membership knowledge about the substantial role nutrition and nutritional supplements can play in keeping people with HIV and other chronic illnesses healthy over the long term. Just as important, the NYBC functions as a buyers' club for nutritional supplements, leveraging its expertise and its nonprofit status to make high-quality supplements available at the lowest possible prices.

The nonprofit, membership-based buyers’ club is a form of organization that has been used by people with HIV for more than a decade. Its basic idea is that cooperative sharing of knowledge and pooling of financial resources is a powerful way of maintaining good health and giving people a sense of well-being, both physical and mental. The New York Buyers’ Club is a vehicle for just this kind of cooperation, and looks forward to having input—knowledge, experience, time, and energy—from anyone affected by HIV, hepatitis, or other chronic illness.

The Need for NYBC: Picking Up Where Others Left Off
A chief reason for the existence of the NYBC is to pick up work initiated by another membership buyers’ club, DAAIR (Direct Access Alternative Information Resources). After a decade of operation, DAAIR suspended supplement sales and closed its office in November, 2003, leaving its clients (estimated at several thousand) without a ready source of supply. Although motivated by good intentions, DAAIR had several problems that led to its shut-down: it had done little or no outreach since 1999, and had not significantly updated its research in the last five years. Moreover, it had no functioning Board of Directors and little coherent membership involvement in decision-making.

Learning from DAAIR’s mistakes, the NYBC has designed an outreach program that aims at making contact with thousands of people with HIV/AIDS, first of all those served by AIDS service organizations in the New York metropolitan area. The NYBC will be getting in touch with these AIDS service organizations (many of which already offer nutritional counseling or nutritional information) to make its resources known across a wide community. It’s likely that many of the thousands of clients served by these organizations will want to have access both to information on nutritional supplements and to the supplements themselves through the NYBC.

The NYBC is also creating a strong internet presence for itself. About 30-40% of DAAIR’s clients were internet buyers only, living in all parts of the US, though especially concentrated in South Florida, California, and the mid-Atlantic region. A buyers’ club like the NYBC with online ordering and information resources would represent a special convenience for people with HIV who live at a distance from urban services. Thus cost-effective internet communications, for example email announcements to websites that deal with HIV treatment issues, will be an important part of the NYBC’s outreach
campaign.

Information is one of the main reasons that people join buyers’ clubs. Accordingly, the NYBC has developed a plan for gathering and making available the best and most up-to-date information on supplements. The NYBC will:


• Establish a list of healthcare practitioners who use or are knowledgeable about complementary/alternative therapies; also a list of organizations that provide nutritional counseling for people with HIV (GMHC, Bronx AIDS Services, etc.)

• Sponsor periodic meetings/forums/open house events on nutrition, nutritional supplements, and HIV

• Maintain on the NYBC website a guide to treatment resources available online (see below)

• Provide information sheets on all supplements stocked by NYBC (including cautions & advisories)

• Respond to individual questions about supplements, and archive those responses using the NYBC website’s forum

• Provide updates on interesting current research, such as Jon Kaiser’s high-dose vitamin, mineral, and antioxidant study

• Supply hard copies of web resources that may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes

• Work to establish a scientific advisory board, reaching out to practitioners who want to contribute to the NYBC’s enterprise and who want to educate themselves.