Agenda

Opening Keynote Plenary & Reception

Description  - TBD

Workshops I - 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

From Principles to Practice: Building Partnerships and Policies for Shared 340B Clients

ADAPs and other Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP) recipients, federally qualified health centers, Section 318 subgrantees, and safety-net hospitals frequently provide care to the same low-income people with HIV. When these covered entities (CEs) share clients, the 340B Drug Pricing Program creates both an opportunity — maximizing rebates, discounts, and program income that sustain ADAP, ADAP-funded insurance, and RWHAP Part B services — and a compliance imperative: only one CE may claim the statutory 340B price for any given prescription, and duplicate discounts must be prevented. Despite shared interest in 340B savings, ADAPs and partner CEs often operate in parallel rather than coordinated systems. The result is unrealized revenue, avoidable duplicate-discount exposure, and friction at the point of dispense. Co-led by NASTAD staff with two ADAP coordinators representing jurisdictions of varied governance structures and 340B mechanisms, this moderated panel will trace the full arc of shared-client coordination: assessing client overlap and duplicate-discount exposure; identifying and convening partner CEs; selecting model(s) appropriate to local context; drafting policy and contractual language; engaging PBMs and 340B pharmacies; and establishing ongoing monitoring and communication systems. Co-presenters will share what worked, what didn't, and what they would do differently — including how they navigated competing fiscal pressures across CE partners, secured stakeholder buy-in, addressed RWHAP Part B subrecipient concerns, and adapted policy as the 340B environment evolved. The session will close with a structured Q&A focused on attendee-specific scenarios. Participants are encouraged to bring current or anticipated shared-client situations from their own jurisdictions; presenters will offer practical, peer-informed feedback. Sample policy language, MOU components, and exposure-assessment tools will be referenced and made available as follow-up resources.

Synergy In Care: Building HIV, HCV, and Drug User Health Systems through Cross- Collaboration & Partnerships

Description - TBD

From Oversight to Partnership: Helping Providers Use Data to Strengthen Quality Improvement in HIV Supportive Services

This interactive session explores how the New York Ryan White Part A Quality Management Program transformed traditional funder-provider relationships into collaborative partnerships that build quality improvement capacity.  Participants will learn how a partnership-driven coaching model helped providers implement meaningful non-clinical measures, build sustainable quality improvement capacity, and improve client-centered care.  The session will feature an interactive interview with Cornerstone Family HealthCare, providing firsthand insight into their experience participating in the Linking Minds-Improving Care Initiative, including successes, challenges, and lessons learned while implementing quality improvement in a real-world supportive service setting.  Attendees will also participate in interactive activities that translate these experiences into practical, actionable strategies they can immediately apply within their own health department.

Using HIV Modeling Tools to Inform Funding, Policy, and Program Decisions

Description - TBD

Addressing Health Inequities for People Who Use Drugs (PWUD): Replicable Rural Overdose & Infection Prevention Models

Description - TBD

Workshops II - 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

From Data to Elimination - Leveraging Surveillance and Local Health Capacity for Integrated HIV/HCV Care

Description - TBD

Bridging Gaps in Rural HIV Care: Leveraging Satellite Clinics, EIS Engagement, and HIV Peer Navigation in Eastern Washington

Description - TBD

Adapting to Uncertainty: Strategies for a Complex Public Health Landscape

This interactive breakout session will explore practical strategies for sustaining evidence-based public health programs and protecting essential services during periods of transition and uncertainty. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Bureau of HIV and STI Programs and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health will share complementary approaches to strengthening public health systems amid evolving funding, policy and operational challenges. Participants will learn how Michigan developed and implemented a collaborative learning model that strengthened insurance navigation capacity across HIV service systems and how Philadelphia has adapted to respond to evolving policy, funding and administrative priorities. After learning about these strategies, participants will have an opportunity to identify approaches they can adapt to their own settings through facilitated discussion, problem-solving activities, and peer learning. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies and resources that can be implemented immediately.

Centering the Margins: Building Meaningful Partnerships with High-Impact Communities for Better HIV Outcomes

People living with and at risk for HIV often navigate intersecting clinical, social, and structural challenges that traditional healthcare systems are not designed to address. These challenges are especially acute for women, transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse individuals, youth and young adults of color, and people engaged in street based survival activities such as trading sex, using or selling drugs, or living unsheltered. Many of these individuals face significant barriers to entering or remaining in care and are often underserved—or actively excluded—by conventional service models.

This session explores how two innovative public health initiatives—the SPARC (Sex workers Promoting Action, Risk reduction, and Community mobilization) program in Baltimore and the Ryan White Part A Minority AIDS Initiative (MAI) Youth Reach Program in the Washington, DC EMA—use intentional, sustained partnerships to reach communities that conventional systems miss. SPARC integrates center- and outreach-based harm reduction and wraparound services in partnership a network of clinical providers and community-based organizations to meet the needs of highly marginalized individuals. Youth Reach leverages a flexible, customer centered model delivered through a coordinated multisite system that brings together pediatric and adolescent HIV programs, clinical care partners, and community organizations to improve linkage, retention, and viral suppression among youth and young adults of color ages 13–30.

This session will begin with a case study illustrating how community based clinical care embedded within trusted spaces can respond to the complexity of participant needs more effectively than traditional medical settings. It will then expand to describe each program’s model, population, and outcomes—from harm reduction and wraparound services for gender-diverse individuals in Baltimore, to improved care engagement and viral suppression for youth across DC, Maryland, and Northern Virginia. The session will conclude with a systems level discussion of partnership infrastructure, braided funding, sustainability, and the mechanisms that enable these integrative models to function—including coordinated navigation, shared care pathways, peer and community health worker strategies, and flexible service delivery design.

Participants will learn transferable approaches for designing or strengthening cross sector partnerships that center marginalized communities, reduce fragmentation, support continuity of care, and build responsive, equitable HIV service systems.

Reimagining HIV Planning Groups: Strengthening Community Commitment and Modernizing Public Health Collaboration

HIV Planning Groups (HPGs) play a critical role in strengthening collaboration between community members, healthcare providers, and public health departments. By bringing together diverse stakeholders, HPGs help identify service gaps, prioritize resource allocation, and guide the development of culturally responsive prevention and care strategies. They also support health departments by providing community insight that improves HIV surveillance activities, enhances outreach efforts, and promotes more effective and equitable public health programming. This session will explore the current structure and function of HPGs with a meticulous look towards common challenges and opportunities for improvement. Participants will examine lessons learned and best practices from health department jurisdictions working to strengthen community engagement, while also workshopping innovative approaches that enhance HPGs so that they are better equipped to address the array of challenges that communities most impacted by HIV are facing today.

Workshops III - 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Meeting the Needs of Now: An Interactive Session to Address the Syndemics 

Join us for an interactive session that bridges evidence-based syndemic principles from theory to practice. During this session, participants will learn more about NASTAD’s first-of-its-kind, practice-centered, syndemic-focused TA center called The Syndemic Technical Assistance Center (SynTAC) and apply their own experiences with syndemic approaches to develop tangible strategies for activation. Through an equity-designed, implementation-science framework, participants will be guided through a visioning activity that provides members with the tools to operationalize syndemic activities that are tailored to the needs of their community and health department.

Workshops IV - 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Funding What Sustains Us: A Future Lab on Rest, Play, and the Public Health Workforce We Can't Afford to Lose

Public health is running on fumes. Health department staff are absorbing the compounding weight of federal funding threats, Medicaid restructuring, executive order scrutiny, and the daily grief of serving communities navigating overdose, HIV, and syndemic issues. The communities we fund, including people who use drugs, people living with HIV, peer workers, and frontline community-based partners, are carrying the same weight from the other side of the table. Yet rest and play remain conspicuously absent from our budgets, our logic models, and our reporting frameworks. They are treated as luxuries, as private problems, or as line items too "soft" to defend to reviewers and legislators.

This 90-minute breakout invites attendees into a future lab, a facilitated and structured space for honest deconstruction and earnest imagination. Drawing on speculative design methodology and the lineage of Black feminist visionary practice (adrienne maree brown, Tricia Hersey, and Walidah Imarisha), the session treats imagination as a serious public health competency rather than an indulgence. Grounded in the reality that workforce sustainability is no longer just a wellness conversation, but a continuity of operations conversation; the session explores what becomes possible when we intentionally design systems that support restoration. The cost of replacing a burned-out epidemiologist, prevention coordinator, or peer specialist is well documented. The cost of not funding what sustains them is borne by the communities we serve. Rest and play are not separate from public health outcomes. They are infrastructure.

Aligning for Impact: Building Partnership-Driven HIV Cluster and Outbreak Response Systems

Intentional coordination between Cluster Detection and Response (CDR) activities and Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) implementation strategies—grounded in strong partnerships that extend beyond traditional public health infrastructure—can strengthen and sustain HIV response efforts. This work depends on meaningful collaboration that connects public health systems with the communities, organizations, and providers most directly engaged in HIV response. This 90-minute interactive workshop will explore how health departments can enhance alignment between EHE implementation and CDR activities through collaborative, partner-driven approaches. Participants will examine practical strategies to strengthen coordination, improve communication, and build integrated, sustainable systems that support more responsive and scalable HIV response efforts. By positioning EHE implementation and CDR activities as interconnected, partnership-driven public health efforts, this session will provide attendees with actionable strategies to deepen collaboration, strengthen system-level coordination, and enhance jurisdictional capacity to detect, respond to, and prevent HIV clusters and outbreaks. Emphasis will be placed on how integrated systems, transparent communication, and relationship-centered engagement can reduce silos, strengthen trust, and support more durable public health infrastructure.

If It’s Broken, Fix It: Opportunities for Modernizing HIV/STI Field Services

In this interactive workshop, facilitators will share lessons learned and best practices for HIV and STI field services programs from NASTAD’s Partner Services Learning Collaborative. Participants will also discuss opportunities for progressing local field services activities and addressing common challenges.

Implementation Sandboxes I - 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM & 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Partners First: An ADAP Implementation Sandbox

Through real-world examples, facilitated discussion, and interactive exercises, participants will explore approaches for building and sustaining partnerships across public health, healthcare, and community-based systems. The session will highlight the importance of engaging community-based organizations, Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program partners, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders as active collaborators in EHE and CDR planning, decision-making, and response implementation—not solely as referral partners or downstream participants. 

Meeting at the Intersection: Harm Reduction and Weather-Related Emergencies

Climate change is a public health crisis. In this session we will discuss how weather-related emergencies impact people who use drugs (PWUD) and the key role that health department and syringe service providers (SSP) partnerships can play in meeting the needs of PWUD. This session will feature health department and SSP guest speakers who will share lessons learned from their work. And participants will have an opportunity to engage in a mock emergency scenario planning session to identify key activities to support PWUD during weather related emergencies and assess current capacity. This session is intended for those working in harm reduction programs or who support PWUD but is also open to all attendees. 

Narrative Change for Racial Equity: An Introductory Sandbox

Narratives shape how people understand the world and what they believe is possible. For decades, harmful stories rooted in fear and division have shaped policies and weakened democracy. This training explores how we can interrupt those patterns and build new narratives that support justice, belonging, and a multiracial democracy. Participants will leave with a stronger understanding of current harmful narrative power and practice applying practical tools for change. 

HCV RNA POC Testing and Implementation Considerations

Participants will engage in collaborative problem-solving to identify opportunities to strengthen communication across systems, align EHE and CDR priorities and operational workflows, and improve coordination between surveillance, prevention, care, and response activities. The workshop will also focus on developing shared approaches to outbreak detection and response that reflect joint ownership and ongoing collaboration.

Implementation Sandboxes II - 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM & 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Centering the Workforce’s Wellness: Strategies, Practice, and Reflection Space to Support our People

Many within the health department and community workforce have a true and personal commitment to syndemic work. Still, workplaces need to take a trauma-informed and person-centered approach to help reduce professional burnout and create supportive work environments for these individuals.

This sandbox centers the wellness of our most important resource, our people – the staff in our health departments, community-based organizations, and harm reduction groups. In this session, three evidence-based strategies that have been identified to support the wellness of our public health workforce will be covered: stay interviews, vicarious trauma prevention and mitigation, and interventional journaling. This session will introduce NASTAD’s new Workforce Wellness Toolkit and provide an overview of each tool and resource included, incorporate wellness exercises, and include activities such as role play and journaling to move newly introduced concepts from theoretical to practical in real time. The session is a good fit for those interested in reflective leadership, supervisors who desire to be more supportive of their staff, and individuals interested in improving their wellness practices.

Syndemic Rapid Start Implementation Sandbox

Description - TBD

Future-Ready Surveillance: Using HIV, STI, and Hepatitis C Data for Action, Evaluation, and Learning

Public health surveillance is evolving alongside changing demographics, aging populations, co-occurring conditions, emerging risk patterns, and increasing expectations for timely, integrated, and actionable data. Yet HIV, STI, and hepatitis C surveillance systems often remain fragmented across diseases, programs, agencies, and different points along the prevention and care continuum.

This interactive Implementation Sandbox will bring health department surveillance professionals together to examine how the surveillance landscape has changed, share jurisdictional strengths and works in progress, and collectively define what future-ready HIV, STI, and hepatitis C surveillance should look like. During the first half, participants will reflect on developments over the past decade and explore current challenges related to fragmented systems, changing data sources and surveillance needs, data integration, syndemic and prevention surveillance, risk factor and congenital surveillance, care cascades, comorbidities, and cross-agency collaboration.

During the second half, participants will work in peer groups to envision the future of public health surveillance and identify what will be required to move toward that vision. Drawing on real jurisdictional experiences, participants will exchange promising practices, troubleshoot current and emerging challenges, and distinguish priorities that require immediate action from longer-term opportunities. Monitoring, evaluation, and learning principles will be embedded throughout the session to help participants examine what their data reveal, assess whether current approaches are generating their intended value, and determine how findings can inform prevention, care, policy, and programmatic decisions.

Participants will leave with peer-informed strategies, new connections with surveillance colleagues, and a practical action plan identifying what their jurisdiction can act on now, what requires longer-term planning, and how progress, impact, and learning will be measured.

Progress Under Threat: Advancing Drug User Health in the Current Landscape

Drug user health, particularly the maintenance and scale-up of harm reduction and syringe services programs, is an essential component of a public health approach to ending HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis, and intersecting epidemics. As the federal funding and policy landscape continues to evolve, state and local health departments are navigating increasing uncertainty while identifying opportunities to sustain essential services and strengthen public health infrastructure. 

This implementation sandbox will open with a speaker who will set the stage by describing their efforts to expand harm reduction services locally, sharing their experience assessing and mitigating significant risk while also working towards an expansive vision of drug users' health and rights. Through individual reflection and peer support from small-group conversations, attendees will analyze the current threats and opportunities to drug user health within their jurisdictions. Attendees will then engage in real-time, practical action planning to identify concrete strategies to protect existing progress, strengthen resilience, and pursue opportunities to expand or innovate harm reduction services in their communities.

Affinity Sessions and Discussion Roundtables - 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

TBD

Closing Keynote Plenary - 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Lead, Lift, and Let Go: Cultivating Community Centered Public Health Leaders

This session highlights the 2026-2027 Chair’s Campaign, “Lead, Lift, and Let Go: Cultivating Community Centered Public Health Leaders”. The campaign, led by NASTAD Board Chair, Maria Jackson, calls on NASTAD members to mentor the next generation of public health leaders and guide them into a public health space that centers communities and vulnerable populations. This roundtable discussion will bring together health professionals who are at different stages in their leadership journey and curate a space for them to discuss what it is needed for emerging public health professionals to succeed and what current leadership can do to support them.