Community Engagement Planning for Ending the HIV Epidemic in Chicago and Cook County (TO 19)

I. Project Approach and Methodology – The Evaluation Center, led by Dr. Gregory Phillips II, will utilize a Communities of Practice (CoP) framework to guide our work for this project. The CoP approach considers three core elements: Domain, Community, and Practice, which can be thought of as describing an issue, the community engaged in the issue, and the action the community takes to address the issue, respectively. We will use this framework to build a learning collaborative centered on bringing individuals impacted by or working on addressing the HIV epidemic together in order to develop a comprehensive plan to end the HIV epidemic. The CoP framework will allow us to identify key stakeholders and to bring together a diverse, dedicated group of individuals to meet project goals. In addition, our team will leverage our experience using the Systems-Informed Empowerment Evaluation (SIEE) framework in prior partnerships to support the collaborative creation of the Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) in Chicago and Cook County Plan, and to ensure the completed draft contains relevant, measurable, and meaningful outcomes and benchmarks. This approach allows for maximally appropriate contextualization of the plan within the greater Chicago HIV prevention system, which will allow for more actionable targets. This framework is particularly useful for this project, as it is designed to build stakeholders’ capacity to develop, plan, and evaluate their own programming and to take a leadership role in their community’s health. The Evaluation Center will operate in four major phases that are time-flexible and responsive to the needs of project stakeholders and staff: 1. The Pre-Project Planning phase will consist of the Evaluation Center working with CDPH to plan initial meetings, set a general reporting schedule, and develop a comprehensive work plan for stakeholder identification, recruitment, retention, and engagement. 2. The Iterative Project Planning and Development phase will focus on establishing positive working relationships with stakeholders, working with CDPH to refine stakeholder engagement plans, and coordinate EHE Learning Collaborative Planning meetings. 3. The Project Implementation and Monitoring phase will consist of ongoing stakeholder engagements and EHE Learning Collaborative Planning meetings, as well as regular check-ins and communication to ensure project activities are running smoothly. This phase will also see the iterative and collaborative drafting of the EHE in Chicago and Cook County Plan. 4. The Utilization and Dissemination phase will focus on collaboratively refining and finalizing the EHE in Chicago and Cook County Plan, and disseminating findings to stakeholders including priority populations, community members, the academic literature, policy makers, and others. The final phase will further involve engaged conversation with CDPH regarding how best to use information gained throughout the project to implement and evaluate the final version of the plan. By the conclusion of the first month of funding, the Evaluation Center will have completed the creation of a work plan to recruit, sustain, and engage required individual representatives and HIV planning groups to constitute the EHE in Chicago and Cook County Learning Collaborative. By the middle of the third month of funding, all stakeholder engagements will be completed and Learning Collaborative meetings will be scheduled to begin. Given that diverse and complex viewpoints must and should be represented in the Learning Collaborative, representatives may be allo