Hoani Jeremy Lambert After eleven years as a NZ AIDS Foundation volunteer, including three years as Trust Board member and two of those as chair, Hoani Jeremy Lambert has decided to sever his formal connection with the organisation he credits with saving his life. Lambert's first contact with the Foundation was as a volunteer with Wellington's Awhina Centre, providing support to people with HIV in the days when medicines provided little of the relief of today's drug combinations. "The NZAF has always been quite important to me personally," he says. "I started as a volunteer at the Awhina Centre in 1996. At that time we were starting to see some progress in anti-retroviral drugs, although certainly not the progress we see today. We still had a number of people who were looking for support and I was a buddy, as we were known as in those days." The buddy system meant he was detailed to provide personal support to an ailing person with the virus, "like going to the movies, and friendship and that kind of thing... and I really enjoyed that." But Lambert's commitment to the NZAF ran deeper than reaching out to fellow gay men. "I went to my first gay sauna in the late 1980s. I was a teenager at that time and the very first thing I remember was being given a condom... and that was directly because of the work that the NZAF was doing then. So I have always felt quite a strong personal passion for the work of the organisation because I strongly believe that they probably saved my life." That passion led Lambert into the most fiery of hot seats two years ago after a year serving on the NZAF Trust Board, its governing body. Part of an influx of relatively inexperienced Board members, he and his colleagues had got off to a bad start when it was revealed that they proposed ring fencing half of the Board's seats for Maori and intended instituting a further quota for people with HIV. The public and behind the scenes reaction from Foundation members, staff, past board members, many in the gay community and even the NZAF's own kaumatua was instant and violent. It became the lowest point in Lambert's involvement with the NZAF. "I believe that that was a decision that was taken without too much thought, not just in terms of not consulting members but also around the initiatives themselves which, with the benefit of hindsight, was out of step with where the organisation needed to be at the time. "The board members were criticised for being out of touch with the members and with the real issues. And, to be quite frank, I believe that the Board at that stage was out of touch." Things only got worse when it was further revealed that the then-board Chair, new to the job and the first Maori to hold the position, had publicly slagged off his own organisation at an HIV conference in Mexico, branding it as inherently racist. Within weeks that Chair, Clive Aspin, was down the road and deputy chair, Simon Robb, stepped up to the plate as the Board wrestled with the fury it had unleashed. "I think that the membership held us to account in quite a public way and as a result the Board was forced to engage a lot more with the real issues of the members," says Lambert, somewhat diplomatically. In fact, within days of a 'blood on the walls' AGM at which members and staff vented dismay and fury, a distraught Robb fell on his own sword. "Simon was under a constant barrage of pressure, because of the decision of the board, which was unfairly placed on his shoulders." SEIZING AN OPPORTUNITY Until that time the Board of the NZAF was respected but low key. From relative stability and obscurity under the chairmanship of immediate predecessors Jonathan Smith and Michael Stevens, suddenly every move the Board made was front page news on GayNZ.com. Stevens had passed the ball to Aspin who dropped it. Rob picked it up, stumbled, and flicked it into the hands of Lambert. Four Chairs in six months. Lambert seized what was clearly a hospital pass with both hands, partly due to his passion for the Foundation's work, partly out of a sense of group responsibility for decisions made while he was a board member, and partly because he thought he saw a way out of the mess. By day a communications manager with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Lambert spotted that the way forward involved communication. "I believed that with a bit of patience and with a clear process, working alongside people who were being quite critical, for all the right reasons, this was the way that we were going to see ourselves out of the mess. And I also saw an opportunity to leave the organisation in a better place than when I joined the Board in 2004.” Lambert and his re-tooled board started a process of nationwide consultation with groups and individuals involved in the fight against HIV. "In a funny way, that low point resulted in what was for me the high point of my time as Chair, he smiles, "which was the intense period of consultation with the membership and delivering the new Trust Deed that not only got us to a position where we were better than we were in 2005 but probably in the best state we've ever been in, in terms of finally having some clarity around our trust deed and constitution. There had been quite a bit of confusion around for quite a bit of time about how those two documents interrelated." That confusion had led the greenhorn board to act somewhat autocratically as trustees, forgetting that they were actually, and unusually, responsible to a paid up, informed and articulate membership. Such an arrangement is possibly unique. Incorporated societies have members, trusts do not. But the NZAF's anomaly stemmed from the early days of the HIV epidemic when it was cobbled together from several regional organisations. "There was confusion between 'are we an incorporated society or are we a trust' because we have these two different guiding documents. In reality we are a bit of both,” observes Lambert. Out of the consultation process the relationship between the Board and the membership, plus a few other legal anomalies, were clarified in a new Trust Deed approved by the membership just three months ago. FRONTING UP TO CRITICISM Lambert pays tribute to his fellow board members who helped steer the way forward, but it is clear to anyone observing the board in action that Lambert's personal style has had much to do with the progress made. He's a hard man to dislike. His dry sense of often self-deprecating humour diffuses tense confrontations, backed up by an archly raised eyebrow and eyes glancing up while scrutinising a sheaf of documents. It's one of those looks school teachers take years to perfect. "I think everyone has their own unique style of conducting their lives and I have always thought that you can't laugh at yourself then there really isn't too much in life that you can laugh at. And whilst I think that a lot of the issues that we have had to deal with are incredibly serious, issues of life and death, there are a lot of things we can laugh about and share with each other." "I think it comes down to acknowledging that everyone, regardless of whether you agree with them deserves some respect. And I feel that I have certainly respected everyone that I have come into contact with in my time as the Chair, and that comes back to recognising that the work of the Foundation is a collective effort which often means bringing people along who mightn't see eye to eye on every issue but who I think, at the end of the day, are deserving of some respect." He certainly didn't see eye to eye with Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia last week when she fired off a much-reported press release criticising the NZAF for neglecting Maori amidst what she believed was a massive surge in HIV infections amidst her constituency. Not for the first time, it was Lambert, not the NZAF's Executive Director, who fronted up to the indignant politician. The criticisms were "pretty easy to deal with," he says, "mainly because they are so unenlightened and I don't see those recent attacks as being all that serious because they are quite easy to fend off... they are basically just demonstrations of poor understandings of our work and also what I call identity politics gone mad." Through the turbulent times spanned by his chairmanship, Lambert has been as visible as the Foundation's more usual spokesperson and first woman Executive Director, Rachael Le Mesurier. Surging HIV infections against gay men, quotas, organisational restructuring, staff discontent, resignations and membership rebellion, all have had to be dealt with on Lambert's watch. "I think I have been more visible, but I don't know if that visibility has been necessarily just because we've been forced onto the back foot on a number of issues. I think a lot of the reason for my visibility is because I am a gay man and while Rachael brings a lot to the position of Executive Director, at the end of the day she is not a gay man. So that has put a bit of responsibility on me to front a lot more than former chairs who have had gay men leading the operations of the organisation. "It's also due to the fact that our community wants to see someone who looks a little bit like them." "One challenge I would put to those who have been quite critical of the Foundation is to think about the humanitarian roots of the Foundation, in the mid 1980s. It was formed out of a sense of compassion for those who were dying due to having contracted HIV, and I have seen during the three years that I have been on the board quite an unforgiving community." Lambert pauses for thought; the practised communicator seems momentarily uncomfortable going deeper within his own personal experience. But having brought up the issue, he plunges ahead. "For instance, I have withstood personal criticism, I have even experienced criticism of my partner..." Lambert pauses a moment to express appreciation for partner Romeo's support through the rough times, then charges on. "...and so I would challenge those who have been critical of the Foundation to think about their barrage of at times uninformed criticism of volunteers, to think what effect that might have on people who give freely of their time, and who have no other motive other than to do good. I think we need to think about the pressure that we place on not just the volunteers who are trustees but the other volunteers who give freely of their time in the interests of gay men's health." It's clear to NZAF observers that Lambert is leaving early. The rules of the Trust Board mean he could have stayed on for another year. And it's no secret that a number of staff members have left the Foundation in recent months, critical of the way it is being managed and restructured. Isn't there a danger that Lambert's departure will be interpreted as his being just one more disaffected person leaping from a supposedly sinking ship? In part two of this interview, we probe Hoani Jeremy Lambert's commitment to the NZAF and his views on the future of gay men's health initiatives. Jay Bennie - 30th October 2007