The Treatment Action Group recently released Community Mobilization: An Assessment of Mechanisms and Barriers at Community-Based and AIDS Service Organizations in Nine U.S. Metropolitan Areas, which summarizes a three-year effort to more fully elucidate the mechanisms of HIV community mobilization in nine high-prevalence metropolitan areas and to more fully understand the myriad mechanisms of, and barriers to, community mobilization work in the United States.
The findings of the report include key recommendations to public and private funders, capacity-building institutions, CBO/ASO program staff, and community activists on the critical components needed to better cultivate, innovate, implement, and evaluate community mobilization efforts. The report primarily focuses on community mobilization geared toward increasing the utilization of services by the communities most impacted by the epidemic. Also included in the report are discussions of mobilization efforts to foster community organizing, activism, and advocacy to change the social, economic, and political environments that currently drive disparities in testing, access to treatment and care, and viral suppression.
