National training and technical assistance - aids united joins with the university of massachusetts-lowell, CAI global, valley aids council, and impact + marketing to propose the cultivate program…

National training and technical assistance - aids united joins with the university of massachusetts-lowell, CAI global, valley aids council, and impact + marketing to propose the cultivate program to build, promote, and elevate the leadership of people with HIV in HIV care systems. People with HIV have an essential role to play as leaders in ensuring that HIV services meet the needs of all who need them, but avenues to building and exercising this leadership can be unclear, unwelcoming, and complex. Building sustainable leadership requires attention to three levels: the individual, community, and organizational. The cultivate program model reflects the leadership of people with HIV at its core, as an advisory council (composed of a majority of people with HIV) will provide input and guidance across all phases of the project. Through extensive outreach and a formal application process, cultivate will recruit 200 diverse, highly motivated people with HIV to participate in the leadership development program. Aids united will lead the development of adapted and new curricula and materials to support leadership training across three program pillars that respond to the three levels of leadership development; altogether, at least 28 modules will comprise the cultivate toolkit for leadership development. The 200 people with HIV recruited for cultivate will participate in three-day training-of-trainers (TOT) programs (10 tots altogether, 20 people per TOT, 8 tots in-person, 2 virtual, and 2 delivered in spanish). During the tots, trainees will receive extensive orientation to the cultivate toolkit, watch the delivery by an expert trainer of modules from the cultivate toolkit, and also have an opportunity to deliver one of the modules themselves, with feedback provided by both expert trainers and fellow trainees. Following the tots, trainees will benefit from extensive further support, including BI-weekly coaching sessions, participation in quarterly online peer to peer learning, and access to exten sive resources for asynchronous learning. With support from coaches, each trainee will, within 4 months of their TOT, deliver leadership training for people with HIV in their own community; altogether, aids united projects that these local trainings will reach 2000 community members and potential leaders with HIV. A rigorous evaluation will document the impact of the cultivate leadership development program and promote its continuous quality improvement over the grant's life. To sustain leadership development beyond the life of the project, cultivate partners will use multiple means to broadly disseminate the cultivate toolkit. Aids united contact information: alicia downes, project director