Claude Rhodes
Outreach Worker Fought AIDS Among Addicts by Lisa Stodder
Claude Rhodes' work in prevention advocacy made him one of the first outreach workers and founders who helped make the Community Outreach Intervention Projects a success.
"Over the years, Claude helped countless thousands of individuals to overcome the binds of chemical dependence and most recently to avoid the plight of HIV infection," said Wayne Wiebel, director of the project in the School of Public Health.
Rhodes died Nov. 2 of a brief illness, shortly before the presentation of the Watkins Award.
"He was very excited about receiving the award," said Agnes Asuan-O'Brien, the project's administrator.
"Although he was hospitalized, he really hoped he would be able to attend the awards ceremony."
Growing up on the South Side, where heroin addiction spread to epidemic proportions during the 1950s, Rhodes was both witness to and victim of the addiction. He turned his life around to become one of the leading figures to fight substance abuse, Wiebel said.
"His memory should remain a sterling example of man's ability to counter negative influences in life," added Wiebel, professor of public health.
In the late 1960s, Rhodes founded a drug abuse treatment a system that used ex-addict substance abuse counselors to staff its ranks. For the next 20 years, he continued to help others battle addictions and served as director of the largest methadone treatment program in the city, Safari House.
When HIV/AIDS began to spread among injection drug users in the late 1980s, he launched a campaign to prevent further spread of the disease.
He joined the School of Public Health's Community Outreach Intervention Projects in 1987 as a training assistant, providing specialized teaching and technical training to clients and staff participating in the AIDS and substance abuse prevention projects.
As a fieldworker and former user, he could go places where the average person wouldn't go.
He was known to take up to half an hour just to walk one block, stopping to talk and pass out bleach and condoms, Wiebel said.
"It's a sensitive thing, trying to get drug addicts to modify their behavior. You can turn them off if you come in preaching. You have to let them know you're not going to be doing it (using IV drugs), here is the way they should do it," Rhodes said in a 1988 interview published in UIC's alumni newspaper.
In 1990, he presented testimony before Congress. He was the author of "The Role of the So-Called Paraprofessional in Six Years of IDAP" and a member of the Executive Council and Clinical Committee for the Drug Abuse Programs, Illinois Department of Mental Health.
He received awards from former Illinois Gov. Richard Ogilvie and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Development Disabilities.
"It's frustrating to know there are so many you'd like to talk to that you can't," he said in 1988.
"When I started, I thought I could go through the whole city. But when you sit down and map it out, it's not just that easy.
"Them being glad to see me come, sticking their hands out and asking me for bleach, that's success," Rhodes said.