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Grantee: Advocates for Youth Washington, DC 20036 Project: Empowering African American/Black College Students to Increase Awareness of HIV/AIDS Risk Factors and Acquire HIV Risk Avoidance/Reduction Behaviors Amount: $879,987 Grant Period: 2010-2013
Project Description | Key Program Findings | Related Goals
Project Description Advocates for Youth (AFY) champions efforts that help young people make informed and responsible decisions about their reproductive and sexual health. AFY focuses on people ages 14–25 in the United States and around the globe.
The purpose of this project was to address the disproportionate rates of HIV infection and sexually transmitted infections among African American/black youth. An important objective of the project was to partner with student health centers at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in Georgia and Mississippi and with two community-based health care facilities (CBHFs), AID Atlanta and Building Bridges.
To accomplish the objectives, AFY helped the student health centers at their partner HBCUs and associated CBHFs in each state to provide culturally appropriate, gender-specific, evidence-based HIV prevention services. The five HBCUs received a seed grant to carry out their interventions, and the two CBHFs received compensation for their services. The seed grants helped the HBCUs to add new condom distribution sites, provide HIV testing and counseling on campus, and link HIV-positive individuals to care. AFY also worked with all of the campuses to develop HIV/AIDS-related policies and a youth leadership council. These councils organized awareness events; held gender-specific workshops on risk avoidance/risk reduction, condom negotiation, partner communication and health relationships; planned HIV prevention awareness activities at freshman orientation; and supported the Greater Than AIDS campaign. The intended outcomes of this project included increased awareness of risk factors for HIV/AIDS, increased knowledge of prevention and intervention strategies to prevent HIV/AIDS transmission, increased HIV/AIDS counseling and testing, improved health outcomes for the target population, behavior modification on the part of participants and more efficient use of resources through the partnership.
To measure the progress of the intervention, numerous measures were collected. Process measures were collected for dissemination of materials, technical assistance and trainings, partnerships with HBCUs, partnerships with the CBHF health education campaign and collaboration with the Office of Minority Health. AFY recorded the number and types of materials disseminated to partners, the number of individuals participating in one-on-one and group technical assistance (TA) and consultation, and the outcomes of TA and training provided, among others.
Data were collected on a range of performance measures, including the number of individuals who participated in the one-on-one and group trainings and education programs, the number of student health center staff trained, the number of condom distribution sites and condoms distributed, and the number of individuals who know their serostatus. Outcome measures were collected through feedback questionnaires on the quality and adequacy of the materials, post-training questionnaires to assess knowledge gain, group discussions and pre-/post-intervention surveys to assess the schools’ change in capacity to carry out HIV prevention activities.
Key Program Findings Reported throughout the Grant Period
Related Goals National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities
Healthy People 2020 Objectives and Sub-objectives