AIDS law advocate’s leadership lauded
Ann Hilton Fisher, who has devoted the past 15 years of her legal career to fighting for the rights of people with HIV and AIDS, will be honored on Friday, June 26, during the ISBA Annual Meeting in Fontana, Wis.
The executive director of the AIDS Legal Council of Chicago (ALCC), she will receive the Community Leadership Award that is given each year by the ISBA Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.
A 60-year-old married suburban mother, Fisher graduated from the Wayne State University Law School in 1977 and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1979.
After clerking in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, she joined the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago as a neighborhood lawyer and for 17 years was senior attorney of its Disability Law Project.
In 1994, Fisher became supervisor of the foundation’s HIV/AIDS Law Project. Three years later, she joined the AIDS Legal Council and became its innovative leader and articulate advocate for afflicted clients.
“Ann has committed herself to working to lessen the stigma against LGBT communities,” said ALCC case manager Justin Hayford, “because our society’s intolerance toward people with HIV grows directly from its animus against gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities.”
Hayford and other nominators pointed to Fisher’s campaign of support for Illinois House Bill 3872. When signed into law in 2000, it raised Medicaid eligibility for HIV-positive people from 41 percent to 100 percent of the federal poverty guideline.
Also noted was her exceptional patience and compassion for clients, whom she treats as though they are colleagues. As Fisher was quoted: “They’re the experts in their own lives.”
In the words of Cook County Public Guardian Robert F. Harris, “Ann and the ALCC put food on people’s tables, help them pay rent and keep their jobs, create stability in people’s lives and let them access health care that may be life-saving.”
Harris praised Fisher’s breadth of legal expertise in workplace discrimination, health insurance, public benefits, permanency planning, and many other issues faced by clients.
When she determined that the ALCC should offer HIV-related immigration counseling to the foreign-born, she and all other staff attorneys took intensive training so they could provide free legal services in this critical area.
Fisher “remarked how improbable it was that she should be learning such a complex area of law at her age (then 55),” said Ricardo Cifuentes, the council’s director of development.
Supporting letters for the ISBA award included one from a 77-year-old gay man who was HIV-positive, alone, insolvent and unaware of his legal entitlements.
“Ms. Fisher’s concern, patience, compassion and the confidence that she inspired immediately impressed and comforted me,” he wrote.
She “continuously made herself completely available to assist me with pension, insurance and benefit issues and changes and I attribute my well-being and optimism to her as much as I do to my doctor,” he added.
Under Fisher’s leadership, the ALCC has been able to double its annual budget, increase its legal staff from four to nine, and expand services to almost 1,500 clients each year.