On April 30th 2015, the day before the commencement of the annual CAHR conference, the Team members met at Ryerson University in Toronto for a day-long planning meeting. In the morning, the team reviewed our plan for the 5-year grant and heard presentations from team members Zack Marshall and Ayden Scheim (“Meaningfully Including Trans Men in our Research”), Garfield Durrant (Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention), and Brent Oliver (The Calgary Men’s Wellness Initiative) as well as Henry Fisher Raymond (Director of Behavioural Science at the University of California, San Francisco) who shared lessons, tips, and tricks for using Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) with MSM gleaned from local and global experiences utilizing this method.
In the afternoon the team broke out into smaller working groups and made great process planning the various aspects of the Team Grant such as our biomedical assessment protocol (HIV & STI testing of study participants), developing the questionnaire (that explores everything from individual behaviours and substance use to relationships and community involvement), and participant recruitment using RDS.
Check back for more news about our team’s projects!