D.C. Department of Health and Mayor's Office of Partnerships and Grants Development: HIV/AIDS Capacity Building Program
Client
To meet the demands of Washington, D.C.'s HIV/AIDS epidemic, the D.C. Department of Health and Mayor's Office of Partnerships and Grants Development joined forces to rally, coordinate, and leverage the resources of community-based service providers to increase awareness, education, prevention, treatment, and ongoing support services.
Challenge
The capacity building program aimed not only to see that recipients of scarce HIV/AIDS funding could effectively manage and use their grants, but also to provide the strategic and technical assistance they needed if they could not. As the grant recipients concluded their first year in the program, the Mayor's office partnered with Reingold to perform evaluations of their efforts and provide technical assistance to improve them.
Enter Reingold
Reingold conducted an assessment of eight community-based HIV/AIDS service providers, using a standardized instrument we developed to both identify their capacity needs and create a baseline for measuring changes in their capacity over time. This process required deep cultural understanding and great sensitivity to obtain the necessary information and identify the best ways to improve the program services. After requesting that each agency use our questionnaire to conduct a self-assessment, Reingold staff held two meetings with each agency: one to evaluate legal and financial capabilities, and another focusing on operations and programs.
Results
Following the completion of the assessments, Reingold produced a report for each agency in a consistent and user-friendly format, providing a foundation for Capacity Building Action Plans (CAP) that Reingold developed for each agency to strengthen their capacity in areas of need. The plans identified short-term, intermediate, and long-range objectives, and included technical assistance and resource materials to help the agencies achieve them.