Project Rise: Healthy Relationships, Informed Choices, Stronger Futures in Los Angeles - Able Works requests $750,000 for the three-year budget period to expand Project Rise through a three-year Competitive Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) project. Project Rise will serve 300 participants in Year 1,2 and 3, totaling 900 youth. Participants will primarily be ages 13–19 and will include pregnant or parenting young people under age 21 in Los Angeles County communities with substantial teen birth, STI, poverty, and educational disparities. The award will reengage two successful former Project Rise partners: East LA Rising, formerly the Boys & Girls Club of East LA; and the Youth & Family Club of Pomona Valley. These organizations met participant targets under the Project Rise team’s previous ACF-funded SRAE grants and maintain trusted relationships with thousands of youth and families across East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, El Sereno, South Los Angeles, Compton, Lincoln Heights, Pomona, and surrounding communities. Trained Youth Advocates from Able Works and its CBO partners will recruit participants and deliver Love Notes 4.1 Comprehensive Sex Education in accessible youth-center and community settings. This relationship-centered curriculum substantially emphasizes both abstinence and contraception while strengthening healthy relationship, communication, self-regulation, decision-making, goal-setting, and future-planning skills. Approved supplemental instruction will address PREP body-literacy and online-safety requirements. Project Rise will also provide youth-friendly referrals, trauma-informed and human-trafficking education through TraumaWise, Trusted Adult–Teen Connection activities, and a Youth Leadership Council. Able Works will deliver programming alongside these partners and provide centralized training, technical assistance, fidelity monitoring, performance management, fiscal oversight, evaluation coordination, and continuous quality improvement. Project Rise seeks to reduce sexual risk behaviors, unintended pregnancy, and STIs while increasing medically accurate knowledge, healthy decision-making, intentions to delay sexual activity or return to abstinence, contraceptive knowledge, healthy relationships, and successful transitions to adulthood.
