ESCALATE

Ending Stigma through Collaboration and Lifting All to Empowerment

ESCALATE (Ending Stigma through Collaboration and Lifting All To Empowerment) was an innovative training and capacity-building initiative specifically designed to address HIV-related stigma that creates barriers at multiple levels of the HIV care continuum.

ESCALATE was open to all Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program Recipients (Parts A, B, C, & D). This included community-based organizations, federally qualified health centers, health departments, planning councils, and planning bodies. Interested Recipients applied as Stigma Reduction Teams.

The Model

The ESCALATE program offered three tracks to mitigate and eliminate stigma in HIV-related service provision in the United States.

• New and Innovative Training: Training was designed to reduce HIV-related stigma through evidence-informed interventions and strategies with an emphasis on cultural humility for HIV service systems, organizations, and individuals. Training was designed to meet the needs of individual RWHAP care providers (e.g., clinicians, administrators, patient navigators) who acknowledged the impact of HIV-related stigma on their client populations and communities. These individuals were ready to create change but may not have had the organizational capacity needed to create change across their clinical setting.
• Technical Assistance (TA): ESCALATE provided tailored TA to individual organizations by assessing TA needs, aligning TA activities and learning opportunities to those needs, and assessing the impact of TA on organizational behavior and change. TA participants were matched with TA Coaches and Subject Matter Experts to address organization-specific goals through intensive 1:1 TA.

• Learning Collaboratives (LC): ESCALATE implemented a Learning Collaborative from April 2023 to July 2024 with up to 16 RWHAP recipients/sub-recipients who sought to address HIV stigma experienced by their staff and/or clients. Organizations participated in a multi-step process of developing, planning, implementing, evaluating, and refining a Stigma Reduction Initiative for a specific population of focus.

  They received coaching, opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, and support from stigma-reduction subject matter experts. In addition, they engaged in collaborative tracking of progress, and practiced continuous quality improvement techniques intended to enhance their initiative over time.

2024 National Ryan White Conference Presentations

• ESCALATE Stigma Reduction Learning Collaborative: Moving towards Stigma Reduction Using Interventions and Quality Improvement Methodologies.
  ESCALATE stigma reduction learning collaborative.
• Group Session 17: ESCALATE Organizational Self-Assessment: A Tool to Target Stigma Reduction Efforts in Organizations, and Creating a Stigma-Free Health Care System Through the Use of Quality Improvement
  Two presentations from the ESCALATE project highlighting resources and approaches for organizations to examine and address the impacts of stigma among their staff and clients.
• Capacitación ESCALATE para la Reducción del Estigma: un Enfoque Interseccional para el Estigma del VIH / ESCALATE Case Studies: Field Stories in Stigma Reduction
  Esta sesión ofrece a participantes una revisión de los hallazgos del proyecto de reducción del estigma ESCALATE del Programa Ryan White VIH/SIDA (RWHAP).

Team

• NMAC: Training
• TRX Development Solutions: Project Evaluation