Local Firm in Global Fight against AIDS
NOBLESVILLE -- Helping fight AIDS seems a natural fit for Helmer Inc.
After all, the Noblesville-based global company has made its mark producing temperature-control devices for blood storage. With that connection in mind, David Helmer, the company's president and co-founder, has teamed up with a local nonprofit company called Loving South Africa.
He wants to directly help people hit by what he calls the biggest epidemic facing the world. According to UNAIDS 2006 Global AIDS report, 39.5 million people in the world have HIV and 28 million of them live in South Africa.
Helmer Inc., founded in 1977, has been in Noblesville since 1987. Currently on Herriman Boulevard, the growing company is moving its 130 employees to the Saxony Corporate Campus in December. The life-science company has customers in more than 100 countries.
While it's important to turn a profit, Helmer, 48, said it's more important to use the company to help people.
"On the surface, we are doing business," Helmer said. "But the strong current underneath is what we are doing to help change lives."
Helmer Inc. has become Loving South Africa's largest corporate contributor since becoming involved about a year ago, according to the organization. Helmer would not disclose how much his company has given.
He is going to South Africa Nov. 4-18 to see the impact of AIDS and what Loving South Africa is doing to help. Taking trips overseas is nothing new for Helmer. He often travels for business or for other causes his company helps. Helmerinc.com lists six international organizations it assists, and the executive tries each one to see what it is doing overseas at least once a year.
He said it's important to have personal relationships rather than just writing checks. He wants to talk with people directly to see how he can better help.
Among others, he will visit an orphanage and a hospital in South Africa. At the hospital, $190 is the difference between a dying child being turned away and one receiving 72 hours' worth of treatment. That's enough time to save an AIDS victim's life, according to Loving South Africa.
Geoff Wybrow runs the 2-year-old organization based in Indianapolis. Eighty-five percent of donations are used to help people in South Africa with the other 15 percent going to administrative costs, but no one at Love South Africa is paid, according to the organization.
Wybrow, 39, a South African native now living in Indianapolis, said he had a promising career in law ahead of him when he decided to see the other side of life in his home country back in 1991. He visited areas hit hard by poverty and AIDS and said it changed his life's course.
"If you were a good kid in South Africa when I was 6 or 7 years old, you were bred as a racist," he said. "So if you were a good kid, you were a good racist."
He said people prayed for him while he was in law school, he found Christ, and decided to seek the truth. He said his time after that was spent working to help people.
"Everyone from my pastor to my mother told me I was crazy," he said of spending time in dangerous areas. "But my heart fell truly in love with the Zulu people."