Create a Community Action and Advocacy Board (CAAB) in Hartford, CT, and build their capacity to develop, implement and evaluate a multi-level intervention designed to promote availability, accessibility, and support for the female condom (FC) in their community.
	Assist the CAABs to customize and tailor interventions promoting FC targeting multiple levels of the community with consistent messages and materials.
	Implement and test the ability of the multi-level intervention to increase availability, accessibility, and support for FC in organizations, and to increase awareness, knowledge, use and negotiation skills, ability to access, and willingness and efficacy to request, try, and use the FC among at-risk women and their partners in Hartford, CT.
	Assess the sustainability of the CAABs and the CAAB-developed interventions.
	Manualize the CAAB training protocol, and identify core elements of the community-based multi-level intervention needed for adaptation and implementation in other communities.

Project Details

A steering committee has been formed comprising key representatives from The Institute for Community Research, collaborating researchers, and advocates from Hartford. Staff will conduct in-depth interviews with CAAB candidates and/or others identified by steering committee members regarding their interest in and ability to participate in a long-term effort to develop and implement a multi-level female condom promotion program. CAAB relationship/capacity building will begin with a kick-off dinner to meet fellow CAAB members, followed by a 1-day retreat to initiate the training program. The CAAB will then meet regularly to develop and implement interventions and assess their effects. 

Intensive ethnographic process evaluation is critical to document factors that affected the successes, failures, and redirection of the community interventions and to provide feedback needed to assess the need for modification. Therefore, process evaluation will document creation and capacity building of the CAAB and the ability of the CAAB to develop and implement locally relevant/targeted multi-level interventions. A community assessment will take place every six months to assess where people can get FC, to document changes in availability of, access to, and support for FC, and to document evidence of CAAB interventions and their effects. In addition, four hundred men and women will participate in a cross-sectional survey at baseline, 12 months, 24 months and 36 months to measure change in knowledge of, attitudes toward, and use of FC, as well as recognition and exposure to CAAB interventions and perceived change in FC presence and support. Finally, staff, steering committee members and the CAAB will work to create CAAB training materials/curriculum.