141st APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

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Recorded Annual Meeting Presentations (RAMP) are now available for purchase.
Only $90 for presenters, $140 for registered attendees and $200 for non-attendees.

Online Program

284390
“spring into love:” best practices for community collaboration in planning a youth-led summit on sexual health and healthy relationships in south los angeles


Monday, November 4, 2013

Jackie Provost, UMMA Community Clinic, Los Angeles, CA
Jocelyn Bush-Spurlin, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
Kerry Lamb, MPH, Sentient Research, Santa Monica, CA
Michelle Cantu, MPH, California Family Health Council, Los Angeles, CA
Jenna Gaarde, California Family Health Council, Los Angeles, CA
The highest rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea in Los Angeles are among African American and Latino/a adolescents, specifically in the 2nd Supervisorial District (South Los Angeles). In 2012, the 2nd District had nearly double the number of chlamydia cases and more than four times the number of gonorrhea cases among women ages 15-24 than the next-highest District in Los Angeles.

To address the high rates of STDs among youth in the 2nd District, community stakeholders collaborated to develop the peer-led “Spring into Love” summit on sexual health and healthy relationships for 250 high school students. Twelve community agencies and 4 high school groups met over the course of 6 months to secure resources and to supervise youth groups as they planned, promoted and facilitated the event for their peers.

The workshops included healthy relationships, consent and coercion, STDs, birth control, and access to services. A matched pre- and post-test was conducted with youth participants at the summit to evaluate changes in knowledge, intentional behavior, and attitudes, as well as empowerment, and awareness of available health resources for teens in their community. A post measure was conducted to assess the perceived usefulness of the summit.

The process, its successes and lessons learned were documented to inform replicable best practices for effective youth engagement in community-driven STD prevention programs. Collaboration among community stakeholders from multiple sectors and empowering youth is an effective way to coordinate community health prevention and engage youth in a sexual risk prevention campaign.

Learning Areas:

Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Diversity and culture
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs

Learning Objectives:
Explain the successes and areas of improvement in planning a sexual health and healthy relationship youth summit for teens to improve knowledge, attitudes, behavior and youth engagement. Identify best practices for peer-led youth-oriented community based health promotion events.

Keyword(s): Community-Based Health Promotion, Adolescents

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am qualified to be an abstract author because I coordinated the youth summit that will be discussed and I work with youth in the target community. I am also a member of the Community Stakeholder group for the 2nd District STD Control Plan, a community based program to combat the disparate rates of STDs in Los Angeles’ 2nd District.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 3308.0: Sexual and reproductive health services and programs