Monday, May 19, 2025
5/19/2025
RYSE Innovation Hub: Reimagining Youth Centered Strategies and Engagement - ETR’s RYSE Innovation Hub: Reimagining Young People’s Sexual Health Equity will support an expansive community of innovators to develop, refine, and test youth-driven innovations to promote young people’s sexual health and reduce teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and their associated risk factors. Rooted in ETR’s Health Equity Framework, the RYSE Hub is driven by our vision that all young people have the personal agency and access to resources and opportunities to achieve the best possible sexual well-being. We will build on our multi-decade experience in incubating and accelerating innovation in adolescent health to engage the OPA Community and broader adolescent sexual health field to address gaps in the evidence base and promote health equity. Additionally, the RYSE Hub will work with innovators to apply the Youth Engagement Principles – a framework co-developed with youth and youth-serving adults – to address the gap in elevating youth voice in the development, delivery, and evaluation of sexual health innovations. Using a phased, dynamic, and equity-focused approach, the RYSE Hub will support multiple cohorts of innovators to progress through ETR’s Concept to Scale Pipeline, an established theory-based and experience-backed hybrid innovation model. Innovation Development Teams (IDTs) will receive funding and technical assistance to explore, prototype, pilot, test, and package innovations that can be rigorously evaluated and/or broadly disseminated. The RYSE Hub will recruit and retain diverse IDTs that prioritize and reflect young people who have been underserved in the adolescent sexual health field, and that demonstrate a commitment to innovation, addressing inequities and social determinants of health, and elevating youth voice in their innovation process. Through a customized support plan and a Learning Collaborative, IDTs will receive technical assistance including the development and testing of Theories of Change, Trauma-Informed Youth-Centered Health Design, social entrepreneurship, and meaningful youth engagement. The RYSE Hub will be guided by a Learning Agenda that cultivates continuous learning by assessing the role of our hybrid approach in fostering innovations that support our vision and address gaps in the evidence base. These findings will be used to iterate and improve Hub approaches and identify new learning questions for further improvement and knowledge-building. Products from the Learning Agenda, IDTs, and the Learning Collaborative will be disseminated throughout the project through conferences, peer-reviewed articles, social media and blog posts, newsletters, and webinars. Demo Events, showcasing IDTs’ innovations, will be featured as part of ETR’s YTH Live Global conference, which brings together over 500 youth leaders and professionals at the intersection of youth, technology, and health. ETR is uniquely qualified to launch, design, and manage a hybrid innovation hub due to our four-decade history as an innovator, incubator, accelerator, evaluator, and distributor of adolescent sexual health programs. ETR is the longest standing sexual health organization with an established infrastructure to support innovation, including the last three years as an OPA-funded intermediary on youth engagement in innovation. ETR and the RYSE staff bring a unique combination of innovation pipeline experience leading to promising and effective innovations, expertise in conducting and providing technical assistance on evaluations on a range of innovations and contexts and incorporating youth voice into the innovation development and testing process. With the engagement of subject matter experts and Youth Innovation Advisors, we will ensure that IDTs receive support that increases the number of promising innovations that are youth-centered, healing-centered, trauma-informed, and likely to impact inequities in young people’s sexual health and well-being.
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).