Work that turns community voice into measurable change.
Ready Aim Innovate (RAI) works at the intersection of innovation and social impact. We blend analytical rigor, community-centered storytelling, and evidence-based systems change to take on some of the hardest challenges in public health and social equity.
Every RAI engagement is a custom combination of services drawn from three portfolios. Insight generation feeds solution design; solution design feeds capacity building, so what we learn with a community becomes what that community can carry forward.
Our Approach: Listen, Code, Act
Communities at the Center: Across every engagement, the constituents are people navigating real systems: people living with and affected by HIV, LGBTQ+ and transgender communities, people experiencing housing insecurity, people living at the intersection of HIV and disability, justice-involved individuals, families disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, substance use, and poverty.
Our vision is a nation where geography, income, race, and background do not determine health outcomes. The customer we ultimately answer to is the community itself, which is why storytellers validate our findings and community members sit on the expert panels that steer our projects.
Listen: Story As Source
We convene storytelling cohorts, technical expert panels, focus groups, surveys, and key informant interviews. Methods draw on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, adapted for modern health and social systems, so that people most affected by a problem shape how it is understood..
Code: Narrative As Data
Oral histories are professionally transcribed, de-identified, and coded by our qualitative science team using validated codebooks. Findings are reviewed and confirmed by the storytellers themselves, then integrated with epidemiological, clinical, and program data.
Act: Insight As Infrastructure
Coded insight drives co-designed models of care, learning collaboratives, workflow redesign, policy advocacy, and workforce training, with implementation science and quality improvement keeping the change measurable and sustained.
Who We Support
RAI serves mission-aligned organizations across healthcare, public health, education, social justice, urban development, and the arts through our nonprofit (RAI Impact Equity Labs, a 501(c)(3)).
Health Departments & Jurisdictions
City, county, and state agencies including Dallas County Health and Human Services, the New Jersey Department of Health, the Texas Department of State Health Services, the New York State AIDS Institute, the Iowa Department of Health, the Louisiana Department of Health, and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
Community-based organizations
Frontline providers such as the Ali Forney Center and St. Clare’s Social Services, plus planning councils, advocacy networks, and grassroots collectives.
Health Systems & Clinical Partners
Hospitals, clinics, and academic medical centers including Montefiore Medical Center and the Rutgers François-Xavier Bagnoud Center working on quality, access, and care coordination.
National & Global Collaboratives
Partnerships with the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC) and Fast-Track Cities partners advancing Ending the HIV Epidemic goals.
Education, Arts & Corporate Partners
Arts organizations and educators integrating representation data into health analytics, and corporate partners using community insight to de-risk products and strengthen engagement.
Where the Work Lives
RAI maintains a national footprint of active consultants, with deep, multi-year engagements anchored in three regions and collaboratives that reach jurisdictions nationwide.
Fireworx & My Voice, Our Stories
A community storytelling initiative operating across New Jersey’s HIV service system, treating community narrative as qualitative data for system planning. Cohorts convened from New Brunswick to Hackensack to Newark, where the Newark Seen photography exhibition, created with St. Clare’s Social Services, featured 15 emerging local photographers, many navigating housing insecurities.
Storyteller data directly informs HIV Care Continuum planning, and the companion Ask for a Test campaign connects residents to testing statewide.
RAPID EHE Dallas & Community Assessment
A multi-year, countywide initiative for Dallas County Health and Human Services building a unified Rapid Start system so people newly diagnosed with HIV, or returning to care, can start treatment as quickly as possible, ideally the same day. The work aligns clinics, emergency departments, jails, mobile units, and community testing sites around one standardized model of care.
Alongside it, our status-neutral needs assessments give the region its evidence base for multi-year HIV service planning.
Fast-Track Cities REHE
Developed with IAPAC, FTCREHE supports jurisdictions across the country in aligning HIV-priority initiatives, developing service standards, training the workforce, and assessing quality of care, building durable, locally owned infrastructure for epidemic response.
DASH: Dallas Accessing Support for HIV
A transformation project mapping how clients move through services from first contact to follow-up. RAI designed detailed workflows, identified bottlenecks, and aligned partners around standardized procedures to reduce variation in the client experience across sites.
New York Initiatives
Friends of Hart Island advances dignity, access, and stewardship at NYC’s municipal cemetery.
The Bronx Health Improvement Project (BHIP) strengthens behavioral health and HIV/STI service coordination. With the Ali Forney Center, RAI assessed readiness for New York’s Health-Related Social Needs / Social Care Network program, mapping eligible services, billing readiness, and the workflows needed to launch.
Through The Coding Academy, community members without advanced degrees learn qualitative coding, thematic analysis, and bias awareness using real project data, so the analytic workforce grows in the same places the stories come from.
Texas Rapid StART Institute
A collaboration accelerating HIV diagnosis, linkage to care, re-entry into care, and timely PrEP access through phased, scalable Rapid ART implementation, aligned with Ryan White and Ending the HIV Epidemic priorities.
The Results
Storytelling – New Jersey 13 Cohorts Statewide Since 2022 Fireworx has convened storyteller cohorts across New Jersey, with 59 oral histories documented and professionally coded in summer 2026 alone.
Needs Assessment – Dallas 2046 Residents Surveyed Our 2022 Northeast Texas Status Neutral Needs Assesment combined a 2046 person survey with focus groups and 12 key informant interviews. The 2026-2030 cycle is underway, targeting 1676 survey participants and 6 focus groups.
Systems Change – Dallas 1 Unified Countywide RAPID Start Model RAPID EHE Dallas is aligning clinics, emergency departments, jails, mobile units, and testing sites around shared protocols, guided by two technical expert panels pairing lived experience with clinical ad policy expertise, and launched through the 2026 Vanguard conening of regional stakeholders.
Fireworx Digital Reach – New Jersey 88,167 Unique Visitors Between June and August 2026, the campaign recorded 95,374 site sessions and 119,154 page views across key websites with top actions being free HIV self-test kit orders.
Qualitative Science – New Jersey 1405 Coded Excerpts, 82 Distinct Codes A single recent cohort analysis produced 1405 Dedoose-coded excerpts, surfacing community support, healthcare access, safety, and family dynamics as teh themes that inform New Jersey HIV system planning.
Won – NYC Parks Oversight & Budget Hearings Friends of Hart Island advocacy contributed to ending a paid public tour program at the city cemetery, expanded family visitation support from database lookup to escored visits, and earned recognition from NYC Parks leadership.
Reach – Organization Wide 5000+ Community Members Impacted Across the portfolio, 1500+ leaders empowered, 30+ cross-sector partnerships created, and a team representing more than 50 combined person-years of expertise.