Thursday, April 25, 2024
4/25/2024
ETR’s Youth Engagement Network (YEN) aims to strengthen youth engagement (YE) in sexual health programs in order to promote optimal health, prevent teen pregnancy and reduce disparities of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Despite widespread support for YE, young people are rarely involved in the design, delivery, and evaluation of YE strategies, and many existing YE strategies lack rigorous evidence on their ability to meaningfully engage youth and improve health outcomes. Furthermore, the field lacks a coordinated and mobilized effort for disseminating effective YE strategies. ETR’s YEN – a youth-community-research network – will use a trauma-informed, youth-centered, research-driven approach to address these gaps. The YEN will establish, coordinate, and support a multidisciplinary and diverse network, including youth, committed to a shared purpose of identifying and developing, testing, refining, evaluating, and disseminating effective YE innovations for sexual health programs. To facilitate network cohesion and impact, partner selection will emphasize commitment to the network purpose and its guiding principles – youth at the center, equity, trauma-informed, science is foundational, continuous learning, and curiosity and collaboration. Network partners will serve multiple roles, including those who will: advise the overall network strategy; develop, test, refine, and evaluate innovative approaches; and provide technical support. The YEN will identify and develop innovative YE strategies through three primary pathways: (1) a comprehensive environmental scan of promising innovations; (2) youth-driven solutions developed by cohorts of young people participating in Trauma-Informed Youth-Centered Health Design; and (3) collaboration and ideation resulting from various network committees. Viable YE innovations will move through an innovation pipeline which includes identifying and developing innovations; determining innovations’ feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness through testing and evaluation; and preparing innovations for scaled dissemination. By the end of the 3-year project, the YEN will disseminate up to 10 effective and promising interventions. In addition, numerous resources will be developed out of the network and disseminated broadly to stakeholders throughout the duration of the project, including tip sheets, blogs, webinars, and journal articles to document emerging findings and lessons learned. The impact of the YEN will be measured by the extent to which we increase: (1) the number and effective coordination of stakeholders committed to YE and (2) the number and accessibility of effective YE innovations. We theorize that better coordinated stakeholders and increased access to effective YE innovations will lead to more meaningfully engaged youth and result in improved youth capacities and sexual and reproductive health services and systems, both of which contribute to health-promoting behaviors. A Learning Agenda and monitoring and improvement plan, developed in collaboration with partners and stakeholders, will guide the evaluation of these goals. ETR and our established partners are uniquely qualified to design, manage and sustain an innovation and impact network in the YE priority area. No other organization has the existing infrastructure to develop, refine, evaluate, and widely disseminate interventions. Our core partners represent youth as well as organizations with national and global expertise in YE, YE measurement, adolescent health, health equity, communication, network engagement, sexual health services and education, and developmental science. As lead of the YEN, ETR brings a unique combination of expertise in YE, adolescent and sexual health, program development, evaluation and dissemination. Our collective capacity ensures ETR and our partners can successfully make an impact on this priority area.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
