Louisiana Launch: SRAE for Transitional-Age Youth in Louisiana - Safe Havynn Education Center (SHEC) proposes Louisiana LAUNCH, a three-year statewide Sexual Risk Avoidance Education initiative serving youth ages 17–19 throughout Louisiana. The project will serve 500 unduplicated youth each year and 1,500 youth over the three-year project period across all nine Louisiana Department of Health public health regions. Programming will be delivered through colleges and universities, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities and community and technical colleges, as well as workforce development programs, transitional living and foster care programs, juvenile justice and reentry programs, and faith- and community-based organizations. Louisiana LAUNCH will provide each participant with 20 contact hours of age-appropriate, medically accurate Sexual Risk Avoidance Education using REAL Essentials Advance. The program will encourage youth to voluntarily refrain from nonmarital sexual activity and other risky behaviors while strengthening the knowledge and practical skills needed to make healthy decisions and prepare for adulthood. Instruction will address personal responsibility, self-regulation, goal setting, future orientation, healthy decision-making, healthy relationships, communication, boundary setting, refusal skills, sexual coercion and dating violence, substance use and its relationship to sexual risk, and human trafficking prevention and help-seeking. The project will also teach the Success Sequence—completing high school, obtaining full-time employment, and marrying before having children—and will reinforce education, employment, healthy marriage, and stable family formation as positive pathways toward long-term well-being and economic self-sufficiency. Through the project's Launch Forward component, participants will receive additional instruction in job readiness, résumé and application preparation, interviewing, career planning, and goal setting. Louisiana LAUNCH will use a positive youth development and trauma-informed approach and will engage parents, guardians, trusted adults, peer educators, and community partners to reinforce participant learning. Youth who need additional support will be connected through a structured referral process to appropriate youth-friendly education, workforce, behavioral health, housing, safety, and other community resources. All participants will receive human trafficking education and information about available help-seeking resources. SHEC will monitor program reach, attendance, dosage, completion, implementation fidelity, referrals, and participant outcomes and will collect and report all required federal SRAE performance measures. Expected outcomes include increased knowledge of the benefits of avoiding nonmarital sexual activity; increased intention and skills to avoid sexual risk; stronger refusal, boundary-setting, and help-seeking skills; increased understanding of healthy relationships, marriage, and stable family formation; increased knowledge of the Success Sequence; stronger educational and employment expectations; and increased ability to recognize and respond to coercion, dating violence, and human trafficking. Through Louisiana LAUNCH, SHEC seeks to equip Louisiana youth at a critical transition to adulthood with the knowledge, skills, relationships, and future orientation needed to make healthy choices, pursue education and employment, avoid behaviors that can disrupt their goals, and build safe, healthy, and economically stable futures.
