Strengthening women and families affected by HIV/AIDS: Best practices in funding and implementing multi-phase HIV interventions for at-risk women

Women of color are at increasing risk for HIV/AIDS, and their needs are insufficiently addressed by currently existing evidenced-based interventions utilized in the U.S. While community-based organizations (CBO's) are often best positioned to offer original methods of prevention, they often lack the capacity to adapt or create and evaluate effective prevention interventions.

GENERATIONS(GEN) is a capacity-building program for CBO's to create or adapt evidence-based interventions for at-risk populations of women. Six CBO's were funded from 2010–2012 to work closely with TA providers through formative, pilot and implementation phases to design original curricula and to address the real-world challenges of delivering culturally relevant programs for women and/or girls.

The combined GEN III Initiative delivered HIV prevention interventions to 614 women, primarily women of color at risk for HIV in multiple urban regions of the country as well as in a rural town in Puerto Rico. The combined sample demonstrated statistically significant intervention effects across all outcome measures reviewed. The multi-phase funding model along with TA and evaluation support were successful in generating tailored prevention interventions that met the needs of at-risk women and girls. The capacity-buildings skills and experiences gained were often transferred to other organizational programs and strengthened overall agency capacities.

The combination of multi-year, multi-phase cash grants, program evaluation, technical assistance and community building increased organizations' capacity to utilize existing prevention research and helped them understand how evaluation results can help them continually monitor and improve programs to ensure that they are meeting their target populations' needs.