Nonprofit · Global Health · Atlanta, GA
Untold.
Formerly CARE for AIDS. A church, two counselors, nine months, and a life beyond AIDS.
HIV / AIDS Care
Faith-Based
4 Countries
Est. 2007
Formerly CARE for AIDS. A church, two counselors, nine months, and a life beyond AIDS.
Somewhere in western Kenya, a woman walks past the pews and into a back room. She isn't here for a sermon. She's here because a counselor - someone from her own town, not a stranger flown in - is waiting to review her medication, weigh her nutrition, and ask, quietly, how she's actually doing. Down the hall, a peer group is meeting. Next week there's a seminar on soap-making. This is a center run by Untold, and it looks nothing like a hospital and nothing like a Sunday service. It is deliberately both.
Untold is a nonprofit that decided the cheapest, most trusted infrastructure in rural East Africa was already built and already full every weekend: the local church. So it put HIV care inside it. Two indigenous staff. Roughly eighty clients. A nine-month program that treats a diagnosis as four problems at once - physical, spiritual, emotional, and economic - rather than one prescription refilled forever.
The results are not modest. Ninety-seven percent of clients reach or maintain viral suppression. More than fifty thousand people have graduated. And the organization measures its impact in an unusual currency: the 145,000 children who still have a living parent.
We believe in a world where no story is cut short or silenced by AIDS.
In the summer of 2007, an American student named Justin Miller went to Kenya on a mission trip and ran straight into the reality of living HIV-positive in a place with too few clinics and too much stigma. He met two Kenyans, Cornel Onyango and Duncan Kimani, who shared the same frustration.
Their idea was heretical to both hospitals and houses of worship: the church could be more than a place to pray. It could be a place to get counseled, fed, and medically supported. They started building a network of caregivers for Kenya's HIV-positive population - and never stopped.
Miller, Onyango, and Kimani launch the first church-based care model.
Formalized as a nonprofit; joins Praxis Portfolio Ventures.
Kept centers running through the COVID-19 pandemic.
New name, same mission; launches the AIDS SAID growth campaign.
Milestone celebrated in March across all four countries.
Untold's bet is that HIV is never only a virus. Treat the medicine and ignore the stigma, the hunger, or the empty wallet, and the medicine fails. So the program addresses all four.
Weekly counseling on drug adherence, hygiene, and nutrition - plus supplemental weekly food portions.
The Gospel is shared with clients who want it; Christian clients receive weekly discipleship.
One-on-one sessions, home visits, and monthly peer-led group therapy to dismantle self-stigma.
Monthly seminars on financial literacy and income skills like soap-making and beadwork.
Co-Founder
Co-Founder · Kenya
Co-Founder · Kenya
Today the organization is led by CEO Molly Heacock, MPH, from the Atlanta office - though the day-to-day work is run by indigenous staff and regional boards across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa.
The woman who walked past the pews finishes the program. Her viral load is suppressed. She has a peer group that knows her name and a small side income she didn't have in the spring. The stigma that once kept her quiet has less to hold onto. She is, in the organization's plain phrasing, living a life beyond AIDS - and her children still have a mother.
Multiply that by fifty thousand and you have the whole of Untold: not a slogan about resilience, just a room in a church, a counselor from down the road, and a diagnosis that no longer decides the ending. The story, as the name insists, stays untold.