Giorno Poetry Systems Relaunches Need Grant, Twelve Recipients Named

May 7. Giorno Poetry Systems announced twelve recipients of its Treat a Stranger grants, a relaunch of the AIDS Treatment Project grants the nonprofit ran through the worst years of the crisis.

The original grants, active from 1984 to 2010, distributed funds directly to artists living with HIV who needed immediate help covering medical bills, rent, groceries. No application forms. No outcomes reporting. Just need and a phone call. The new iteration keeps the structure. Twelve artists, twelve checks, no strings.

The name is borrowed from a Giorno poem. Treat a Stranger ran as part of his Dial-a-Poem series in the 1970s, one of dozens of recorded pieces you could hear by calling a rotary number in lower Manhattan. The nonprofit he founded to house that project has outlasted him by five years now. He died in 2017.

GPS didn't release recipient names or grant amounts. The announcement lists disciplines: poetry, performance, visual art, sound. All based in New York. All flagged by the board as facing immediate financial pressure. The grants go out this month.

The relaunch comes as other arts nonprofits are tightening eligibility criteria, asking for more documentation, more proof of output. GPS is moving the other direction. Less paperwork, faster turnaround, smaller pool. The model assumes the people closest to the work know who needs help.

It's a structure that only works at small scale. Twelve grants, not twelve hundred. The original AIDS Treatment Project distributed over $1.2 million across 26 years, almost entirely through word-of-mouth and direct artist referrals. This version appears to be following the same path.