The face of HIV/AIDS patients is changing, and the Douglas County AIDS Project is responding by increasing staff and providing more comprehensive case management.

But, of course, that takes money, making annual fund-raisers like the upcoming Valentine Dance and Silent Auction even more important.

The event will begin with a silent auction at 7 p.m. Saturday in Liberty Hall, 644 Mass. The dance will feature R&B singer-pianist Kelley Hunt and her band.

Sidney Hardgrave, project director, said the agency is seeing a disproportionate incidence of HIV in women and people of color, particularly African-American and Hispanic-Latino populations. But perhaps most alarming is that 50 percent of new infections in the United States occur in youths under the age of 25.

“In terms of case management, the difficulty we are seeing is that our client base is increasingly representative of people with numerous life challenges,” Hardgrave said. “Not only are they living with HIV and in need of assistance to negotiate the medical care system, but we are much more likely to be serving people who are also living in abject poverty, struggling with addiction or striving to maintain sobriety, or who have an additional chronic or mental illness concurrently with HIV.”

As a result, Hardgrave said project staff members have been required to learn more about government-funded social service programs and to spend more time on case management.

“In the past few years, we have found it necessary to double our case management staff, not because we are serving significantly more people but to ensure that the staff has the time to attend to individual needs of our clients,” Hardgrave said.

Hunt has performed at the Valentine’s Dance since its inception 11 years ago. This year, she and her band will play songs that will appear on her new, yet-unnamed, recording project as well as songs from her previous albums.

“This allows me to use what I do to help them,” she said. “Over the years, unfortunately, we’ve all had friends who are HIV-positive or have passed away. It’s opened my eyes to the reality of how it affects teens, women and kids. It’s a human issue.”