Training people with HIV disease for involvement in community planning process: Project LEAP. Learning Empowerment Advocacy, Participation.

Social and political pressure, as well as public health theory, mandate inclusion of PLWHIV in community planning and policy development processes. Barriers to PLWHIV participation may be cognitive, instrumental, and/or affective. The authors report on development, implementation, and initial evaluation of a pilot project testing a psychoeducational intervention to increase organizational participation by people with HIV. Organizational participation by individual increased from a mean of 0.5 organizations at entry to 2.3 at follow-up. Evaluation data indicate that increases in self-esteem, self-confidence, and specific knowledge, along with demystification of organizational operations, networking, and modeling by project staff contributed to the outcome.