Office of Minority Health

Community Education Group
3233 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Washington, D.C. 20020-3711
(202) 544-9142 (Phone)
(202) 543-9146 (Fax)
http://www.communityeducationgroup.org

Community Education Group (CEG) seeks to stop the spread of HIV and eliminate health disparities in neighborhoods by training community health workers, educating and testing individuals who are hard to reach and sharing their expertise with other organizations through national networks and local capacity building efforts.

Back to Life (B2L)
$470,596
A. Toni Young
(202) 543-9142
tyoung@communityeducationgroup.org

The purpose of the Back to Life project is to increase the availability of health care, and social and supportive services for residents in Wards 7 and 8 in Washington, D.C., who have been recently released from substance abuse treatment or incarceration, as well as these individuals' families and social networks. CEG will partner with organizations, such as Family Medical and Counseling Services, Regional Addiction Prevention, Good Hope Institute and the Max Robinson Center Whitman Walker clinic to form a network of health care and social supportive services, which will include food and employment assistance, HIV treatment and mental health counseling. The program will use case management, the Social Network Testing Model (in which individuals who receive HIV services are enlisted to encourage members of their social networks to be tested for HIV), motivational interviewing (a style of counseling designed to elicit behavioral change) and referrals to engage participants and connect them to appropriate services. The intended outcomes of this project is to improve knowledge about HIV/AIDS, improve health behaviors and lower the incidence of HIV in the target populations, as well as improve survivability rates and develop more efficient use of resources and assets through the use of their partners. In order to determine if such outcomes are reached, data will be collected on a range of performance measures, including the number of individuals who receive services, know their serostatus and return to care. Partners and clients will also be surveyed for additional data and feedback and the data will be analyzed on a monthly basis.

OMH objective(s) toward which the project's results most contribute (check all that apply):

• Increased awareness, education, and outreach to address racial/ethnic minority health and health disparities problems
• Improved access to, and appropriate utilization of, health and other community-based services and systems through user-centered design for racial/ethnic minorities (e.g., health IT, culturally/ linguistically appropriate services, service provider education/ training, workforce diversity)

Key (not more than five) Healthy People 2010 objectives or subobjectives (by number and name) towards which your project's results most contribute (see Appendix 3 of OMH's Evaluation Planning Guidelines at).

• HP 2010 4: Improve access to comprehensive, high quality health care services
• HP 2010 13-7: increase the number of HIV-positive persons who know their serostatus
• HP 2010 1-4: increase the proportion of persons who have a specific source of ongoing care
• HP 2010 1-5: Increase the proportion of persons with a usual primary care provider
• HP 2010 13-4: reduce deaths from HIV infection