Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

HIV/AIDS is both a historical experience of loss and community resilience, and an ongoing public health concern for communities most impacted in Canada (e.g., gay men, Indigenous peoples, people of colour). Oral history can help address these persistent health challenges by preserving the past and providing insight into how current prevention and treatment interventions can be reinvigorated. Although some HIV/AIDS oral history and storytelling projects have occurred with certain populations in certain regions, there is no national connection. This proposal aims to connect those researchers and community leaders, evaluate the feasibility of a national collaboration, and prepare future grant applications. Ultimately, this work will help to preserve cultural memory of the early AIDS epidemic, promote much-needed cross-generational and cross-sector dialogue in the present, and contribute a more nuanced temporal lens to future health research, promotion, and care. This funding would be used to hold a National Planning Summit and to catalyze future national projects. Our main three objectives are to: 1) Hold a blended (online and in-person) national planning summit to bring together researchers and community leaders with expertise in HIV/AIDS storytelling to evaluate viability and plan expansion of national HIV/AIDS oral history collaboration and storytelling methodologies. This will allow for the identification of key knowledge gaps and the generation of new research questions; and 2) Collaboratively develop new HIV/AIDS oral history grant applications to document unique and contextual early experiences of HIV/AIDS in different key populations and geographic centres across Canada; and 3) Produce a digital knowledge translation module summarizing key results of the planning summit for a broad audience.