Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

The goal of this grant is to hold meetings to plan studies involving people who use drugs in Toronto and Ottawa. The meetings will include members of the community of people who use drugs, people who work with people who use drugs, health care providers, and researchers. Throughout the planning process, people who use drugs and affected communities will be meaningfully involved as equal partners. We will use the planning grant to: create the capacity for effective community-accountable research and to establish an engaged research team for ongoing collaboration between key stakeholders; review best practices that other teams have used to address some of the challenges associated with research involving people who use drugs and bring together stakeholders to discuss these challenges; establish research priorities in partnership with community partners; and select the best surveys for addressing these priorities. We will establish two community advisory committees made up of people who use drugs, people working in harm reduction, and policy-level decision makers. We will ask meeting participants to complete a pre-meeting online survey in which they rank possible priorities. We will hold 2 meetings (1 in each city). Meeting invitees will include community advisory committee members and study investigators as well as a broad range of stakeholders, with an anticipated attendance of about 30 to 40 people in each city. Each meeting will be 1.5 days in length. The meetings will include presentations highlighting the results of the priority setting survey and work to date and discussion of how to move forward with planning for the studies. Our anticipated outcomes include: establishing a sustainable working group to drive the planning process forward; the results of the environmental scan; a prioritized list of research goals, objectives, and projects; and a grant application reflecting these priorities and addressing anticipated methodological challenges.