CORE: Lessons Learnt Report

The CORE (COmmunity REsponse to End Inequalities) project successfully strengthened community-led integrated testing and linkage-to-care for vulnerable hard-to-reach populations in 10 countries across Europe. Over its 36-month implementation period (January 2023 – December 2025), the project achieved remarkable outcomes including 678,333 integrated screening sessions, distribution of 2.7 million condoms, and a major public health milestone: advocating for PrEP access in Cyprus.

This is a report on lessons learnt from the implementation of the project.

Despite facing typical challenges of large EU-funded consortia including bureaucratic complexities, and the inherent difficulties of applying institutional funding frameworks to small community-based organisations CORE demonstrated the vital importance and feasibility of community-driven approaches to HIV, viral hepatitis, STIs, and tuberculosis services.

This comprehensive Lessons Learnt Report documents critical insights across three key areas:

• Management: How the project navigated partner coordination, financial capacity building, evaluation frameworks, and the challenges of working within reporting systems. Key achievements include robust partner retention, strengthened collaborative networks, and improved financial management capacity across implementing organisations.

• Communication and Knowledge Exchange: The successes and challenges of capacity building, webinars, workshops, and cross-community learning. The report highlights the crucial need for better engagement with frontline community health workers and peer workers, rather than solely management staff.

• Interventions and Advocacy: How CORE expanded testing services, integrated multiple disease screenings, reached new populations, and achieved policy victories. The report emphasizes the essential role of peer workers, the effectiveness of integrated testing in reducing stigma, and the urgent need for sustainability planning.

The core lesson learned is unequivocal: community-based services, despite demonstrating their value and feasibility, require sustained funding commitments from governments and health systems to survive beyond project cycles. Future initiatives must embed sustainability planning from the design phase, incorporate buffer budgets for operational flexibility, and integrate more effective advocacy and fundraising strategies throughout the entire implementation lifecycle.

About the CORE project

The CORE Project (“Community Response to End Inequalities”) aims to reduce inequalities by promoting, strengthening and integrating the community responses that have proven key in bringing services closer to persons who would benefit most but face inadequate access, in particular countries where these responses are still lacking. This will happen through capacity building, networking, and the exchange of good practice and innovative approaches, as well as through a proactive outreach and engagement of relevant stakeholders, while addressing legal, policy, and structural issues to promote integration of these approaches into disease prevention and health promotion strategies and systems.

The CORE project will build on and intensify collaboration of regional networks and national and local organisations of people living with HIV, key populations, and service provider organisations. It will use, adapt, and disseminate existing national, regional, and global good practice approaches and tools from across key populations and disease areas, and provide platforms for exchange.

Read more about the CORE consortium and its plan of action here: https://core-action.eu/core-home.

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Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The CORE project has received funding from the Health Programme of the European Union under grant agreement No 101080079.