One of the great pleasures in David Brinkman’s role as CEO of DAP Health is when he is tasked with touring visitors around the organization’s ever-expanding campus near Vista Chino and Sunrise Way.

“Whether they’re visiting from a big city in North America or they’ve traveled halfway around the globe, people will always ask me, ‘How did a city of this size create a response of this scale?’” Brinkman says. “That always gives me the opportunity to say, ‘This is not just a small town in America. This is a very unique town and with a unique history. Almost everyone who lives here knows how fortunate they are to be part of the community. That really changes people’s motivation and commitment to volunteer, to donate, to serve on boards, to personally address issues, and to roll up their sleeves and help.”

“That,” he adds with a boyish grin, “is a big part of our secret sauce.”

To say that the DAP Health (formerly Desert AIDS Project) is one the greatest successes in public health would be an understatement. As a local institution, it stands as equally tall as Eisenhower Medical Center or Desert Regional Medical Center. But while those health organization were always accepted and well-funded beneficiaries of the health establishment, DAP Health was created in near secrecy during the early years of the disease when merely saying the phrase AIDS elicited fear and prejudice. The perseverance and resilience of the organization is admirable; its growth to serve thousands of people in our valley is nothing short of astounding.

In 1984, a core group of eight people secured the support of then California Secretary of State March Fong Eu, to establish the Community Counseling and Consultation Center Inc., a nonprofit that would eventually evolve into the Desert Aids Project. The CCCC was so named because no organization would risk using AIDS in a title, let alone stenciled on an office door. The atmosphere was particularly repressive because of the bigotry and prejudice of certain Palm Springs community leaders, particularly Mayor Frank Bogert. In one particularly heinous instance, these ‘leaders’ asked a hotel owner to shelve his plans to turn his property into a residence for people sick with AIDS. They did not want AIDS and Palm Springs in the same sentence.

When Bill Smith became the executive director of DAP Health in 1987, he focused on winning over local politicians and city governments. Slowly, some contributions came in that allowed the fledgling organization to keep running. According to Brinkman, one of the most significant milestones for DAP Health in the late eighties was the election of Sonny Bono as mayor. “Sonny was our mayor from ’88 to ’92. Sonny and Cher’s relationship to the gay community is an enormous part of why the community was embraced by this leader. Having a mayor who said, ‘You boys are welcome here; you are safe in my town’ was a critical part of (DAP Health’s forward movement).” Brinkman says one of the next major shifts in public and political perception were the celebrities who came out to support DAP Health and the fight against AIDS indifference. “Gerald and Betty Ford got involved. Kirk Douglas got involved. People leveraged their power and celebrity at DAP Health’s initial AIDS walk. Some people who were not locals in the 80s and 90s may not know who Steve Chase was, but he was the most famous designer of his time. Steve was the most published interior designer in Architectural Digest history. He served on all the influential boards in the region. It was a sign of success if Steve did all your homes. But most famous was his relationship with the Krocs (founders of McDonald’s). Steve and Joan Kroc were dear friends. They were neighbors in Thunderbird. When Steve was dying (he passed away in 1994), it was a time when other (gay) men of his power in the valley, such as Liberace and Rock Hudson, were hiding. It was hard to be seen by the public, but Steve allowed himself to be seen and used his voice to raise money. When Steve died, Joan donated her home that Steve designed…and all the assets at the property. That seed money from the Krocs (provided) the foundation that we’ve built upon.”

During this time, Brinkman was a student at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. “The AIDS crisis was devastating my community. I spoke to my mom and dad about it when I was a young adult. They gave me great advice. They said, ‘Don’t run from it, run towards it and see what you can do to be of help on the frontline.’”

Brinkman moved to LA and earned an MBA from Pepperdine University, but he wasn’t interested in the corporate world. Instead, he ran a charity for homeless youth in Los Angeles. One weekend, he and his significant other came to the desert for a meteor shower. He read an article that said the CEO of DAP Health had resigned. “I said to my other half. I want that job. I would do anything to work with that organization. I’ve been the CEO for the last 15 years.”

David Brinkman has been busy every day since. He has substantially increased the number of people DAP Health serves, the diversity and volume of services, the number of volunteers, and increased the budget by 500%. The organization raises $100 for every $15 it spends and for ten years in a row has been awarded “four-star status” by Charity Navigator, America’s largest independent charity evaluator. During his tenure, “DAP Health established a dental clinic, a permanent housing community, three primary care clinics, a wellness center, a behavioral health clinic, a department of Community Health, and a vocational program as well as achieved Federally Qualified Health Center status.”

A recent example of the effectiveness of the organization has been its response to COVID and the recent Monkeypox epidemic. “We moved very quickly with both COVID and Monkeypox, working with our infectious disease physicians to create messaging long before the government. We didn’t waste a moment. We started talking to our community about how to protect themselves, educating them (on) harm reduction strategies. Our infectious disease team was talking about Coronavirus-19 before you and I even knew the term. I can remember the Sunday where one of our infectious disease physicians texted me and he said, “Tomorrow, we need to open up an outpatient COVID clinic. It needs to be COVID only by 8 a.m. tomorrow.’ Board members and staff all came in their gym clothes on that Sunday and we started stocking a room with PPE, nebulizers to open the lungs, oxygen for people to breathe, because we knew our local ERs were going to be inundated. For people who didn’t need inpatient care, there had to be an outpatient because there wasn’t any treatment.”

Despite the heroic efforts of organizations like DAP Health, the dithering, misinformation (“I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute”) and lack of rapid response in the early days has resulted in a grim, ongoing statistic: 17 million people dead, and rising. Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, more than 40 million have died. Brinkman, of course, never stops wondering how many lives could have been saved with a clear, efficient approach.

In response to the Monkeypox outbreak, DAP Health “certainly knew how to communicate quickly to high-risk populations. We know what apps they’re on; we know where they are in social media.” Nonetheless, despite all the lessons learned from the past, Brinkman is left frustrated by the tendency of government leaders to hide their heads in the sand. “Palm Springs has a long history of sex tourism for both the gay and straight communities. If we were Bangkok, we would be talking about sex tourism as leaders. When Monkeypox hit, we should’ve talked to all of our sex workers in a very short period of time. Monkeypox really brought forward that we are not serving everybody equally in our community. We have not developed public health responses to care for some of the most vulnerable members of our community. California has work to do there. Sex tourism is a part of our region. We need to make sure that when it comes to public health that we are using the most current knowledge and best harm reduction strategies to embrace that community and to support them.”

In large measure, Brinkman credits DAP Health’s successes to lessons learned in the early, dark days of the epidemic when there was almost nothing to help people living with the disease.

“When we were founded in the early 80s, there were no medications to treat the disease. People died in short order, 12, 24, 48 months,” he says. “We didn’t have good pharmaceuticals…even fifteen years, there weren’t any. So, there was an enormous drive by our founders to impact the immune system. DAP Health has always been holistic in its approach, but one of the things you can see in our timeline is identifying housing as a critical part of addressing somebody’s immune system. Without restorative sleep, without nutritious meals, without safety, medications will not be nearly as effective (and) you do not truly build somebody’s immune system.”

Brinkman is nothing if not passionate about DAP Health’s mission to provide for all aspects of their clients’ well-being. It was a lesson he learned as a young man working in an HIV clinic in Portland, Oregon, where a similar sister organization brought in healers and therapists of every description to keep patients alive. “You can see it’s the same thing for dentistry. It’s the exact same thing for our mental health and substance abuse clinic. It all needs to be addressed.”

Not long before Brinkman joined DAP Health as its CEO, the dream of its founders to provide housing was realized with the ground-breaking for Sunrise Vista, the apartment complex adjacent to the facility that provides 81 studio and one-bedroom apartments to people living with AIDS or who are HIV positive. Now, nearly two decades later, ground has broken on Sunrise Vista II, an additional housing unit that will provide 61 studios and one-bedroom apartments for those with mental and physical disabilities and chronic illnesses. Twenty-nine units will be set aside for the houseless. Like the residents at Sunrise Vista, residents will be walking distance to their primary care physicians, dentists, mental health professionals, therapists, a campus pharmacy, and the food bank.

Sunrise Vista II is another building block in the extraordinary expansion of DAP Health’s campus over the last few years. Ten years ago, the late Annette Bloch donated $1 million to build the Annette Bloch Cancer Care Center and then, in 2016, she donated $3 million that DAP Health used to buy the adjacent Riverside County Health building.

Brinkman says one of the most exciting projects that will soon get underway is the construction of the Pavilion, a building that will essentially bind together the campus facilities. As he explains, “there is not a main entrance to our facilities. A part of our strategy is to build a safety net for the most vulnerable in our community. The pavilion will allow one entrance and the opportunity to connect with a case manager and to enroll in benefits in which a case plan can be built to address the unmet needs of the individual.”

Brinkman continues to explain that in more concrete terms it means providing much needed space for different kinds of programming. For instance, he says that “one of the things I’m really excited about is building a café for jobs training for our clients. Many of the people we care for have not had a job for upwards of a decade. The reason could be illness or incarceration or homelessness. When you haven’t had a job for a long period of time, it’s very hard to get interviewed. We have a jobs program on site, (but) in the pavilion, we will have our first business that will be run by our clients. It will help them build their resumes, so when our job coaches help place them in the community, they’ve got a recent track record.”

The fit and lean CEO (who manages his own physical and mental well-being by regularly doing one and two mile open water swims off the shores of La Jolla) often indulges in a little fantasy time on Google Earth by going above the campus at Vista Chino and scouting land where DAP Health can expand and someday offer housing and support to the elderly and aging population. “Our commitment to our community runs deep.

The idea that somebody would reach an age where they weren’t able to bathe themselves or feed themselves, that their life might see additional suffering, is just not something we would be willing to accept.”

In the short term, Brinkman and his team are always devising new ways to connect and inform their community. For this month’s Pride Parade, there will be a DAP Health Pavilion, a large carpeted tent featuring yoga, sound baths, Transcendental Meditation training, 12-Step Speaker meeting, LGBTQ+ health care, and sex positive kink. In addition to offering community connection via Speed Friending and country western line dancing, there will be invitations to walk with DAP Health in Sunday’s Parade where their theme will be Walk Out Loud to encourage members of the community to use their voices to advocate for LGBTQ+ health equity.

Lastly, the other ingredient in DAP Health’s secret sauce is its 400 volunteers. “We have so many people — well-educated and highly accomplished —with so many skills that they bring to us,” says Brinkman. “That’s not replicable in most major cities. It makes a dramatic difference.”