Community Engagement

For decades, local community planning has been critical to HIV prevention. Community engagement is also paramount to the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. (EHE) initiative and has already shaped the initiative in many important ways. The 57 priority jurisdictions engaged their communities in the development of their own locally tailored, community-driven plans to lay the foundation for scaling up the initiative’s key strategies in ways that meet local needs, achieve health equity, and optimize HIV prevention and care in these communities. CDC and other federal partners have worked with these jurisdictions to encourage creative solutions to continue bringing longstanding and new partners into the planning and implementation process.

CDC is also committed to conducting meaningful, ongoing community engagement efforts with a number of community partners to advance health equity and EHE goals. In 2022, CDC began convening a number of community engagement events with community leaders and members to discuss community-driven solutions to advance HIV prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and outbreak response. These engagement events will continue throughout 2023.

Community-centered approaches are key to understanding and addressing the longstanding inequities that continue to contribute to severe HIV-related disparities and to working together to advance the EHE initiative. To address these inequities and reach EHE goals, it is important to have a shared understanding of the barriers to and opportunities for success. Therefore, the Division of HIV Prevention (DHP) is hosting regional town hall sessions, to collaborate with the community to address these barriers and maximize these opportunities to reach our shared HIV prevention goals. The details of the next community engagement town hall are provided here: