Organizing community research partnerships in the struggle against AIDS

Despite pharmaceutical advances, AIDS remains a health problem difficult to treat, leaving preventive interventions as the primary means of promoting risk avoidance. Increasing the capacity of university-based researchers to develop culturally, developmentally, and contextually appropriate AIDS prevention strategies requires the collaboration of community service and advocacy partners. To date, neither university researchers nor community providers have a great deal of partnership experience. Thus, a common language and set of experiences are yet to be developed. This article reviews the history of university-community and researcher-community collaboration for AIDS research and intervention, placing the innovative work of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and its community and foundation partnerships among those efforts at the forefront of the community-university dialogue. It concludes with suggestions derived from the collaborative work of UCSF researchers and community service partners to strengthen efforts to develop theory, research methods, and results that are immediately useful and productive of long-term prevention research efforts.