Fund Research that Helps Advance the Goals of the NHAS

Research is a key factor in reaching each of the three NHAS goals.  Some of the 60+ references to research in the NHAS include:

• Improving health outcomes requires continued investments in research to develop safer, cheaper, and more effective treatments.
• Ongoing research efforts are needed to find a cure for HIV/AIDS and continue to develop improved prevention tools and effective treatments. The Strategy cannot succeed without continued and sustained progress in biomedical and behavioral research.
• More operational research is needed to determine which behavioral interventions are scalable and produce robust and sustainable outcomes.
• Additional research is needed into the unique factors that place women at risk for HIV infection.

Opportunities

Funders can:

• Support the participation of impacted populations in research trials
• Fund partnerships between nonprofit organizations doing work on the ground and academic institutions with the capacity to impartially collect and analyze data in a meaningful way
• Help a group of non-profits in one community pool their data into a single database
• Provide technical assistance from corporate research and/or IT teams 
• Support the publication and distribution of a grantee’s research findings to advocates and agencies developing public policies
• Pool resources with other funders to support research projects
• Fund demonstration projects to help ensure that valuable research is brought to scale in a community setting
• Support research partnerships between local governments and academic institutions/local nonprofits.

Challenges

• Like advocacy, research takes time and it may not yield significant outcome data in a single grant year.
• Research projects are often quite costly and require multi-year funding as well as multi-funder participation.
• There is also no guarantee that the research findings will find their way into public policy.
• Gathering sophisticated outcome data from the field is often beyond the capacity of community-based organizations. 
• Independent community-based efforts may be too small in scale to prove valuable to the development of public policy on a state or national level
• There is often an absence of uniform processes and formats so that the data cannot always link to or support data gathered from other communities.