Building Capacity through Partnerships: The Use of Community Collaborative Evaluation and Research to Build Capacity for HIV/AIDS Prevention

Abstract

The purpose of this special issue is to address the role community collaborative research can play in the development of prevention evaluation research and intervention capacity on a local level through community organizations and/or local health departments and on a statewide level through infrastructure developed through collaboration between public health and research systems. This issue will focus on projects from the California Collaborative Research Initiative (CCRI)—a partnership between the California State Office of AIDS (OA) and the Universitywide AIDS Research Program (UARP) at the University of California, Office of the President. Projects included in this special issue demonstrate the need for community research; illustrate strategies for using community collaborations as a process and mechanism for building multidirectional capacity for researcher, local health departments, CBOs and communities; and locate capacity building in the context of intervention evaluation. In a concluding article, best practices for collaboration and evaluation capacity building from projects will be synthesized and linked with statewide evaluation systems designed to illustrate the translation of local capacity into statewide support mechanisms. To establish a context for projects presented, the following introduction will provide a conceptual framework for the role of collaborative research as a capacity-building mechanism, locate the California community collaborative initiative within this framework, and outline the premise, contribution, and organizational structure of this special issue.