Event One: Strengthening Our Practice: Refining Our Aim __________________________________________________________________________ Ask Us About - 1.1 San Francisco __________________________________________________________________________
New Mexico HIV Prevention
HIV Prevention:
How to reach the youth
Goal: How to reach youth in and out of school about HIV prevention, and
Sub goal: develop a tag line that “grabs” youth.
NM Public Education Department HIV Program is working in partnership with several agencies that work with youth in and out of school. HIV in youth is low but pregnancy and other STI’s are not so. Adult HIV is rising, and we know that risky behaviors at a young age may be a contributor.
According to the 2007 NM Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey (YRBS) 31% of students who were currently sexually active, 44.8% did not use a condom that last time they had sexual intercourse. Sexually Active girls (51.4%) were more likely than sexually active boys (36.8%) to report not using a condom.
Our team wanted to know how to reach youth about the perils of HIV. We went directly to the youth to find out. We were fortunate that the youth assembled for our focus group had knowledge about HIV risks. This HIV Coordinator partnered specifically with the NM CPAG (Community Planning Action Group) because one of the CPAG’s targeted populations is youth and the Region 3 co-chair of CPAG had a similar idea about hearing from youth. We invited a diverse group of youth (from within the Region 3 area) to the table. (CPAG is divided into five regions based on geography).
We asked the following four questions.
If you were able to design your own health education program for a 9th grade class what would be the most important issues you would want the teacher to address?
Many of today’s youth have concerns about their physical and emotional health, where do you seek information?
What do you think are the most common physical and emotional health concerns of today’s youth?
How do we reach homeless youth who are attending school and those who are not?
We had a great discussion during the first meeting due to the questions being broad and facilitators were able to integrate aspects of sexuality and HIV. During the second meeting, we looked at solutions. One of the solutions was that a HIV prevention tag line should be marketed everywhere, in schools and in communities! The group worked on a few but eventually decided that what is now current is perfect. “ACT Against AIDS: Every 9-and-a-half minutes another person in the United States becomes infected with HIV and we added GYT: Get Yourself Tested 2010”.
Next steps are to provide HIV fact sheets with the tag line and distribute to school nurses, homeless liaisons and health teachers.
