Office of Population Affairs
Office of Population Affairs
Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs
Adolescent Family Life (AFL)
Prevention Demonstration Projects
2009-2010
Pima Prevention Partnership
Tucson, Arizona
Pima Prevention Partnership (PPP) is a non-profit organization which operates a behavioral health facility for adolescents, and provides health risk prevention and early intervention services for adolescents, families, and adults. The AFL prevention demonstration project, entitled, “Families Trust” is an expansion of its existing in-school ten hour abstinence component that includes the following additional components: parental, familial and mental health/counseling. For the in-school component, sixth grade students receive the “Choosing the Best” curriculum once a week for ten weeks by an adult facilitator. All parents are offered a 2-hour parent workshop at different times at the intervention schools to make it more convenient for parents to attend. A subset of parents participates in an intensive family strengthening workshop series. The “Strengthening Families for Parents and Teens” curriculum will be adapted from one of SAMHSA’s best practice model program to include information and activities related to sexual decision-making. There are 8 three-hour sessions with each session consisting of a dinner, separate parent and teen classes and a family session. A master’s trained counselor is facilitates the parent and family components. The counselor also provides individual and group behavioral health support to participants that include an assessment and eight therapeutic sessions. The evaluation will test the impact of parental involvement in abstinence education in school settings. The evaluation is a quasi-experimental design with a matched comparison group. Parents are randomly assigned into intervention and control groups. There are pre and annual post testing with a two year follow-up.
Grant: $346,741
Contact: DeeAnn Arroyo; 520-326-2528 x2107
Healthy Connections
Mena, Arkansas
Healthy Connections is conducting a school based educational and motivational abstinence project called “Voices for Healthy Choices.” The project serves 7th grade students and families in and around Mena, Arkansas, in the heart of the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas. The project delivers abstinence education to students, asset building activities, community service opportunities, and recreational activities. The project evaluation uses random assignment and will examine the outcomes of students who are in the program compared with students who are not in the program.
Grant: $353,941
Contact: Doreen Tapley; 479-243-0279
Catholic Healthcare West dba Northridge Hospital Medical Center
Northridge, California
Northridge Hospital Medical Center, a non-profit community hospital, is implementing the AFL prevention demonstration grant, “Promoting Abstinence for Teen Health through Artes Teatro”(PATH-AT). Based on findings from a previous Adolescent Family Life grant, PATH-AT is an abstinence only in-school and after-school intervention using peer educators and the arts to engage middle school students and their families in learning and understanding the benefits of delaying the onset of sexual activity. Latino middle school students age 10-13 receive 15 hours of WAIT (Why Am I Tempted?) Training sessions are implemented by trained high school peer educators in-school. Participants also view an abstinence-themed play. Theatre field trips for 7th and 8th grade students introduce them to the larger world and their communities. Parents are engaged in a Let’s Talk parent workshop series. A true experiment design is used to conduct the summative evaluation of PATH-AT and will track treatment and control participants for at least two years.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Bonnie Bailer; 818-785-3143
Vista Community Clinic
Vista, California
Junior REACH (Recreation, Employment readiness, Academic achievement, Communication skills, and Healthy lifestyles) is a project operated by Vista Community Clinic in two high-risk areas in North San Diego County. Junior REACH serves youth (boys and girls) 9-12 years old through a youth development-based, long-term after school program. The project serves about 120 youth per year and the target population is primarily Latino. Youth have the opportunity to receive up to 200 hours of service annually. The groups meet at 2 different community centers in the afternoon for the entire school year. Services include: pregnancy prevention, service learning projects, health and fitness activities, arts and cultural programming, gender specific support groups, and parent workshops. The pregnancy prevention programming lasts for 8 weeks (about 30 hours) for each youth on a rotating schedule. The project also provides service learning opportunities, health and fitness activities, arts and cultural programming, and gender specific support groups. Youth participate for the entire school year alternating through each module. The project also provides 8 weeks (16 hours) of programming to 50 parents per year using the “Let’s Talk” curriculum (a combination of “Can We Talk?” and “Guiding Good Choices”). These workshops directly mirror what the youth are learning in their program. The evaluation uses a longitudinal quasi-experimental design with a matched comparison. The intervention is provided for one year for each cohort and then the project tracks those youth for two years. The project collects data at baseline prior to the pregnancy prevention component, post intervention, and at 12 and 24 month follow up. This evaluation intensive design will look at areas of decision-making and refusal skills, intention to delay sexual activity, and self-efficacy.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Danel Vickerman: 760-407-1220 ext. 7163
Maria Yanez: 760-407-1220 ext. 7140
Colorado State University Cooperative Extension Multi-Site
Cortez, Colorado
Colorado State University Cooperative Extension (CSU) program is implementing a rigorous multi-site randomized intervention of the Dare to Be You Care to Wait program. This innovative program examines the effects of a comprehensive parent-child intervention as compared to a youth intervention only. Both interventions are 11 sessions long (approximately 22 hours) and are based on the same curricula and materials. Both interventions are rooted in solid youth development approaches. CSU is implementing this program with multiple matched sites across the country. The evaluation looks at individual program effects as well as a comparison between the two interventions. Participants are followed up at 6, 12, and 24 months to examine long term effects on attitudes regarding sexual activity and parent-child communication.
Grant: $800,000
Contact: Jan Miller-Heyl; 970-565-3606
Colorado State University Cooperative Extension
Cortez, Colorado
Colorado State University Cooperative Extension Youth Development program is implementing the Dare to Be You Care to Wait program. This project targets 12 to 14 year old youth and their families through 22 hours of family based workshops over 11 weeks. Over the course of 5 years, the project will reach 1140 family members. The project also targets community members who work with youth through 15 hours of community training and will reach an additional 600 youth. The project includes follow up booster sessions and a mental health component to address a multitude of family needs. This project works with families in one urban area of Colorado and one rural area. The evaluation randomly assigns families into one of two groups: treatment or control. The evaluation is examining whether the adolescents and parents who receive the treatment fare better on a number of outcomes than those in the control group. Families are followed up at 6, 12, and 24 months.
Grant: $335,843
Contact: Jan Miller-Heyl; 970-565-3606
Friends First
Littleton, Colorado
The Friends First program provides two unique models of pregnancy prevention programming to help delay sexual initiation and reduce sexual activity. The STARS mentoring program is a cascading mentoring model using high school students as mentors and peer educators who deliver after school mentoring education to middle school (6th-8th grade) students with a focus on improving attitudes about delaying sexual initiation. The Quinceanera program delivers culturally relevant pregnancy prevention programming to 12-15 year old girls and their families. In this program, parents and their teenage daughters meet together to discuss issues related to sex, healthy decision making, parent-child communication, and healthy development. The program evaluation randomly assigns group sites in the STARS program to either the intervention or a comparison group. The Quinceanera program is evaluated using a quasi-experimental design. The evaluation will follow participants for up to 2 years post intervention.
Grant: $339,800
Contact: Gina Harris; 720-981-9193
Communities in Schools of Georgia
Atlanta, GA
In an effort to make an impact on the teen pregnancy rates in the state, Communities in Schools of Georgia (CISGA) is collaborating with 5 local CISGA affiliates to implement a multi-site school-based primary abstinence education project that compares a basic in-school abstinence education program model to a school-based model enriched with small-group mentoring as well as supportive activities. The intervention utilizes regular classroom teachers during class time on a weekly basis. The basic intervention model provides 15-25 hours of abstinence education using Choosing the Best and WAIT Training as the core materials during school time. In the enriched model, students will receive the basic abstinence education program instruction followed by small group mentoring sessions. The mentoring component tenets are structured around goal setting, team building, tutoring, health education, and service learning. The mentors are adult volunteers who are recruited, screened and trained and work with about 5 students at a time. The intervention strives to improve parent-child communication by assigning homework activities, conducting informational seminars and other resources including the Parents Speak Up resources developed by DHHS.
Grant: $800,000
Contact: Tina Duckett; 706-885-1110
Augusta Partnership for Children, Inc.
Augusta, Georgia
The Augusta Partnership for Children, Inc. is implementing a community saturation approach by providing intervention to students and capacity building with parents. The project expands an existing in-school abstinence citywide component using Choosing the Best curriculum by offering 6th through 11th grade students in intervention schools experiential application of the abstinence message in various classes. Teachers develop their approaches to applying the abstinence message to their subject area. For example, students attending technology classes will develop social marketing tools that promote the abstinence message throughout the community. Additionally, intervention students will experience multiple asset development opportunities through community partners, family case management services and their parents will participate in parent education groups that meet monthly. Through these groups parents have parent education and training including pare leadership/advocacy training and referral to community resources. After the first year of participating in the program, parents and youth will have the opportunity to participate in leadership development activities. Parents will have leadership roles in the parent education groups by being a part of a parent speakers bureau. Eleventh grade students receive 8 hours of initial training and ongoing monthly training in order to properly mentor seventh grade students and speak on the topic throughout the community. This evaluation utilizes a longitudinal, randomized design with pre-survey, immediate post-survey, and 12 and 24 month post follow-ups. Qualitative methods are also be used to make adjustments to programmatic components. The evaluation design consists of seven schools (four middle schools and three high schools) as the intervention group where students and their parents receiving an array of services and seven schools (three middle schools and four high schools) as a treatment as usual comparison group of schools where abstinence-only curriculum taught in health classes is offered.
Grant: $344,439
Contact: Robetta McKenzie; 706-721-1040
Demoiselle 2 Femme
Chicago, Illinois
Demoiselle 2 Femme is a 501(c)(3) not for profit agency serving Chicago and the south suburban Chicago community of Thornton Township. The grantee agency was founded in 1994 as a community-based program committed to serving adolescent females in their transition toward womanhood. The services are holistic in approach, and encourage young ladies to develop academic, social and career goals that will challenge them to excel beyond their current limitations. The AFL project targets African American girls ages 14-18 and their parents offering comprehensive abstinence education youth development strategies through weekly workshops. Activities include mentoring, personal development, community service, and academic assistance. The evaluation plan has 4 over-arching goals: to increase adolescents’ understanding of the positive health and emotional benefits of abstaining from premarital sexual activity; to reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies among adolescents; to reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among adolescents; and to increase the involvement of parents in the lives of their children. The evaluation effort is quasi-experimental in design with 3 comparison groups and includes pre- and post-test surveys with a 12 month follow-up survey administered to youth and parents.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Tori Tyler; 312-458-0644
Lake County Health Department
Waukegan, Illinois
The Lake County Health Department is a certified county health department, Federally Qualified Health Center and is JCAHCO accredited, serving North Chicago, IL, an urban community located 50 miles north of Chicago. Project FOCUS serves predominantly African American and Latino 6th, 7th and 8th grade students and their parents. The intention of Project FOCUS is to demonstrate that kids are more likely to abstain from early onset of sexual behavior and other risky behaviors as a result of the youth development intervention offered by the grantee. The services include teen abstinence education, parent sexual health education workshops and support, parent-child connectedness training, cultural enrichment field trips and positive future orientation. Interwoven into all levels is the exploration of the role that cultural heritage and values play in making personal choices. The evaluation uses a randomized, experimental design which will contribute to the field of knowledge about promoting adolescent sexual abstinence and offer information useful for program development and replication.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Susan Bekenstein; 847-377-8188
HOPE Worldwide
Ellicott City, Maryland
HOPE Worldwide Baltimore is implementing the Healthy Communities Baltimore prevention demonstration project with 9-18 year old youth and their parents enrolled in 16 YMCA programs located in Title 1 schools in Baltimore, Maryland. The project delivers a peer-to-peer education program focusing on healthy lifestyles, abstinence, conflict resolution, resistance skills, and parent-child communication. Participants are randomly assigned to receive the intervention.
Grant: $399,955
Contact: Aloysius Essien; 484-744-9306
Adolescent and Family Comprehensive Services, Inc
Bronx, New York
Adolescent and Family Comprehensive Services (AFCS) is a non-profit organization that provides supportive services to youth and families since 1979. AFCS is implementing the Family Life Abstinence Project to target 1,000 fifth through tenth grade students and 200 of their parents from ten Bronx schools. The Family Life Abstinence Project is comprised of an in-school, after-school and parental components. The in-school component implements “Sex Can Wait” and “Managing Pressures Before Marriage” curricula. The after-school component consists of structured programs and cultural events conducted for three hours on weekdays, engaging participants in youth development activities, asset building, nutritional counseling and prevention services. The parental component implements the “Common Sense Parenting and Active Parenting of Teens” curriculum weekly. The evaluation design consists of randomized treatment and control groups among six schools with measures being conducted at baseline, 6 months, 12 months and 24 months for both treatment and control groups.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Jacqueline Edwards; 718-299-2327
Program Reach
Bronx, New York
Program REACH is a non-profit organization which provides pregnancy prevention programming with a focus on delaying sexual initiation throughout the community. The prevention demonstration project, Healthy Respect Character Education Program (HRCEP) uses its character-based curriculum to teach about healthy relationships, self-respect and academic goals. The prevention project is provided to 4th-6th grade students in the Yonkers Public Schools. In addition, students participate in youth development after school clubs. Parents of the participants attend 7 workshops and remain engaged through newsletters and parent/child homework assignments annually. A quasi-experimental evaluation design with matched comparison schools is being implemented.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Nanci Coppola; 718-409-0900
Catholic Charities of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse, NY
Syracuse, New York
The Choices Enhanced Program works to reduce teen pregnancy among low income, racially and culturally diverse youth in Syracuse through community-based Parent-Child Connectedness Training, community-based Abstinence Education Workshops for youth ages 9-15, and Youth Development Activities designed to build and reinforce skills and assets that youth need to build healthy, successful lives. The overall goal is to increase parents’ involvement in the lives of their children, to increase parent-child connectedness and to improve parents’ ability to monitor the behavior of their teenage children. The youth participants will demonstrate an understanding and favorable attitude of the benefits of abstinence as well as intentions to make healthy lifestyle choices including choosing abstinence until marriage. The evaluation component of this project is designed using a 2x2 (2-group, 2-condition) pre-test and post-test randomized field experiment.
Grant: $399,998
Contact: Felicia Castricone; 315-474-7428
The Public Health Authority of Cabarrus County
Kannapolis, North Carolina
The Public Health Authority of Cabarrus County provides public health services to families in Cabarrus County. The AFL prevention demonstration project, Taking Responsible Actions in Life (TRAIL) is built on lessons learned from its preceding AFL abstinence demonstration grant. TRAIL participants will engage in abstinence education and enrichment activities over a three-year period. The project focuses on impacting school-wide social norms towards positive decision-making. Using a saturation model, students, parents and teachers of the intervention site receive the social norms marketing campaign. Students in grades 7th – 9th are targeted to receive abstinence education instruction and youth development activities. Their parents participate in parent-child homework activities, newsletters and family events at the school. The evaluation design is quasi-experimental using a matched comparison school. The evaluation plan employs quantitative analytic procedures and qualitative methods with appropriate incentives and follow-up tracking.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Barbara Sheppard; 704-920-1249
Catholic Social Services of the Miami Valley
Dayton, Ohio
The model offered by Catholic Social Services of the Miami Valley (CSSMV) is a comprehensive youth development prevention project for youth involved with the child protection agency. In this intervention, case managers meet one-on-one with participants to explore and evaluate the youth’s hopes, to highlight the youth’s strengths and potential, and integrate these with the needs and difficulty of the youth. Through this process, a Youth Development Plan is developed which will serve as a road map to success for the youth participants. The grantee believes that the combination of the relationship-based model, intensive case management and other supportive activities will be the keys to preventing teen pregnancy, STIs and destructive family relationships. Project services have 2 distinct phases of implementation over 24 months of individually serving youth. The first year of service is designed to build and cement the relationship between the youth and the service provider (youth development specialist). After the youth development plan has been created, the services are intensive, comprehensive, and mostly home-based. Parents are involved in all aspects of the program, beginning with the initial assessment of service needs with the youth development specialist. Service needs identified are parent-specific and relate to the teen-parent relationship. Parents are engaged in sessions along with their child to support and increase their level of knowledge about adolescent development, risk-taking behaviors, and communication. Throughout the 24 month intervention, there are curricula-driven group activities. The Teens Making a Choice project has a randomized control group design using interview, self-report surveys, document review and staff observations as data sources. The evaluation of the program is comprised of both process and summative evaluations.
Grant: $395,375
Contact: Peggy Seboldt; 937-223-7217 Ext. 2133
Northwest Family Services
Portland, Oregon
Northwest Family Services (NWFS) is implementing a demonstration project that focuses on intensive parental involvement. Twenty schools are being compared for the assessment of possible group differences based on the matching strategy and random assignment. A randomized design has been selected as the method for the demonstrating the effectiveness of the intervention. The reference population for the enhanced intervention demonstration projects is comprised of students and parents from urban, suburban and rural geographical locations throughout Oregon. Schools from each county are selected and matched based on social demographic factors. Approximately 4000 eighth graders and 2000 parents will be included in the intervention. Six out of the twenty schools which will be serviced have a minority enrollment which exceeds fifty percent. The lessons infused within the curricula will include healthy boundaries, media influences, consequences of early sexual initiation, premarital sex, and a creative component allowing participants to highlight the positive elements of delaying sexual initiation. Youth leaders comprised of high school and college students serve as volunteers by assisting as actors in socio dramas which will feature teen issues and positive ways of managing peer pressure.
Grant: $800,000
Contact: Rose Fuller; 503-215-6377
To Our Children’s Future With Health, Inc. (TOCFWH)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
TOCFWH, a community-based, non-profit agency, is operating the AFL Comprehensive Abstinence Program. It is a multi-tiered intervention which will be delivered to families in low-income housing developments primarily in north and west Philadelphia and in other cities in Pennsylvania. The primary intervention consists of youth abstinence education and parent child intervention. The AFL CAP will use the Discovering Dignity curriculum to provide abstinence instruction to youth ages 12-18 in twenty one hour sessions after school in the housing developments. In addition, the parent child intervention will be six 2 hour sessions with children participating in the 2nd, 4th, and 6th sessions. Parents will receive information on abstinence, communication and the parental role. During the alternating weeks, the families will engage in activities that promote communication including PSA development, newsletters and T-shirt logo development projects. Also case management services are offered. The community service component is the AFL-CAP’s featured enriched model for testing. Participants will be placed throughout the community at nonprofit agencies completing community service projects based on the participant’s interest. Monthly meetings will be established to monitory attendance and the participant’s progress. The experimental longitudinal design consists of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods comparing 7 intervention sites and 7 comparison sites throughout Pennsylvania. A pilot program will be assessed in year one with an intensive process evaluation.
Grant: $800,000
Contact: Dr. Robin Foster-Drain; 215-879-7740
Austin Learning Academy
Austin, Texas
Austin Learning Academy is implementing the Keepin’ It Real prevention demonstration project with middle school youth and their families in high risk middle schools in Austin, Texas. Youth are randomly assigned to receive high-intensity, campus based, after school and summer programming promoting the delay of sexual initiation or to an alternative afterschool program. There are also services provided to parents and family members of youth in the intervention group in order to support the prevention messages delivered by the project.
Grant: $398,000
Contact: Toni Williams; 512-457-9194
Fifth Ward Enrichment Program
Houston, Texas
The Fifth Ward Enrichment Program is implementing a prevention demonstration project with middle school and high school African American and Hispanic males in the Fifth Ward of Houston. The project uses pregnancy prevention, violence prevention, and substance abuse prevention curricula, as well as mentoring, tutoring, and cultural and leadership development activities. Students receive tutoring and mentoring services from adult mentors, preferably from the same community. These mentoring services provide role modeling of successful African American men. The project utilizes a network of collaborative partners to provide the support and referral sources needed by the young men. Program participants are exposed to many activities and opportunities, including college and career visits, positive male role models who promote healthy life style choices and non-violence, and entrepreneurial and leadership development training. The program evaluation uses a quasi-experimental design to examine the outcomes of male youth in schools receiving the project compared with male youth in schools who do not receive program services.
Grant: $400,000
Contact: Charles Savage; 713-229-8353
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