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

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.