The International AIDS Conference is a bi-annual 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 works to leverage the conference to build the local HIV response. This event was scheduled to take place in San Francisco and Oakland, CA in July 2020; however, the COVID-19 pandemic forced organizers to move the conference to a virtual platform. Until that shift, leaders and activists from the San Francisco Bay Area convened a local coordinating committee and begin 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 some challenging relationships among participating organizations. Several regional meetings were attended by more than 100 representatives of local organizations, where leaders met to plan conference logistics, discuss plans to create and maintain an equitable international conference, and coordinate the conference, which would be jointly held in two nearby cities for the first time.