The International AIDS Conference is a biannual event organized by the International AIDS Society. Each conference is planned in partnership with a local coordinating committee that spearheads the planning of local events, advises international organizers, and leverages the conference to build the local HIV response. The 2020 International AIDS Conference was scheduled to take place in San Francisco and Oakland, CA in July 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizers to move the conference to a virtual platform. Before that shift, leaders and activists from the San Francisco Bay Area had convened a local coordinating committee and begun planning the local conference.
Facente Consulting was hired to help plan and facilitate the local coordinating committee meetings, which were expected to be highly political, with complex relationships among participating organizations. Regional coordinating meetings—several of which were attended by more than 100 representatives of local organizations—were held to plan conference logistics, discuss plans to develop and implement an equitable international conference, and coordinate the conference, which, for the first time, would be jointly held in two nearby cities.