Black Brothers Esteem Collaborative Evaluation

BBE logoThe Black Brothers Esteem (BBE) Program of San Francisco AIDS Foundation is a comprehensive HIV prevention intervention with individual, group, and community mobilization components targeting African American men who have sex with men (MSM) living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and surrounding neighborhoods.

The goal of the collaborative evaluation is to assess changes over time in BBE members’ knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors relevant to reducing the risk of HIV transmission. The evaluation also focuses on measuring the changes along the psychosocial, environmental, and substance-related predictors of HIV risk that the BBE program aims to influence. Some of these factors include measuring experiences of racism and homophobia as well as stabilized housing, spiritual development, improved access to health care, communication skills-building, and community connectedness.


By utilizing a collaborative and participatory approach to the design and implementation of the comprehensive evaluation of the Black Brothers Esteem services, we aim to increase the capacity at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Recent data shows that African-American MSM are more than twice as likely to be HIV positive than other MSM populations. The collaborative approach and subsequent findings may also be of great use to other service providers and scholars working to decrease HIV transmission among marginalized African-American MSM communities in the United States.

submitted: Tue, 2009-11-17 00:44