Jul 18, 2003  |  By: DWAUN SELLERS  | COMMENTS     

People around town are desperately searching for the perfect pair of white pants this weekend, not because of a resurgence in ‘80s fashion, but to wear to the annual White Attire Affair sponsored by the Ummah Endowment Fund on Saturday, July 19 at the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center.

“I originally got the idea from the Miami White Party because that is actually geared toward raising money for HIV/AIDS,” says Abdur-Rahim Briggs, founder and board member of the Ummah Endowment Fund. “I said to myself, we could do the same thing. I wanted to create something that is on another level socially and dealt with HIV.”

Briggs, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a minor in public administration from California State University at Bakersfield was also inspired to organize the White Affair for more personal reasons.

His twin brother revealed to him in 1987 that he is HIV-positive.

“Right now his condition is stable but that motivated me [to start the Ummah Endowment Fund] because I felt I had to do something. I didn’t know where I was going with this [idea] I just threw caution to the wind.”

Before there was an Ummah Endowment Fund, Briggs began hosting the White Affair in the backyard of his home.

“I had volunteers bartend and play music in the background,” Briggs recalls. “In 1999, I held the White Attire Affair Party for Us Helping Us and it was very successful.”

Last year, the White Attire fund-raiser was held at the Warner Theater. This year, it moves to the grand Ronald Reagan Building close to downtown D.C. General admission tickets are $35 and VIP tickets cost $100.

Before the first expanded White Attire event took place last summer, Briggs teamed up with Clyde Penn, Jr. and Garrick Good in November 2002 to help make the Ummah Endowment Fund a reality and the White Attire event the talk of the African-American community.

“We formed the organization initially to do business in order to put on the fund-raiser and after doing our research on HIV/AIDS in the Washington area we found that there was a void here for an organization such as ours,” explains Penn who serves as Ummah’s board chair and chief executive officer.

Penn said he and other Ummah organizers decided to bring the African-American gay community together in a social environment “and hit them very hard with the message of HIV/AIDS and the impact it has.” The organization’s motto is “be tested, be treated, be healthy, be safe and live,” he said.

LAST YEAR’S FUND-RAISER DREW more than 800 gay men, lesbians and their supporters and raised $110,000 in cash and in-kind donations. This year, organizers have asked HIV/AIDS groups that want to receive a donation from the Ummah Endowment Fund to complete an application documenting what type of programs they would use the money to create or continue to operate. The request for proposal will go to organizations at the end of July; figures for the amount of money raised at the July 19 event will be available in early August.

Though the group’s designation by the IRS as a non-profit organization is still pending, Good said they can raise and distribute funds before full approval is granted.

Already, the Ummah Endowment Fund has its critics.

Ron Simmons, executive director of Us Helping Us, told the Blade that after being designated as the chair of last year’s event — and promised $10,000 — it took numerous phone calls and much more time before the organization actually received the funds promised.

“As a brand new organization we have had some bumps in the road but we have retooled and are moving forward,” Good responded.

“When you’re a new African-American organization you become a target of a lot of things and the greatest thing is expectations,” Penn said. “We made a huge stir last year when we pulled off the [White Attire Affair] for Us Helping Us, that many people didn’t believe that we could do.”

Us Helping Us is a local HIV/AIDS service organization created in the mid-1980s to primarily assist black gay and bisexual men,
Penn also noted that Ummah, which means “community” in Arabic, is not just an organization that caters to the gay community.

“We are an organization that seeks to be the preferred philanthropic collaborative of funding for HIV/AIDS activities targeted toward people of color,” he explained. “We plan programs and activities that are targeted toward every aspect of the community. It just so happens that the first benefit that we organized was the White Attire Affair, and ...