Mainstreaming prevention in young black men
Prevention needs to be mainstreamed into the lives of young black men in order to take root. However, the social context that many young black men face make this goal particularly challenging. We would like to change this by empowering young black men to become more effective participants in their health and well-being. We will achieve this by providing an intensive summer preventive health program that uses a framework of resilience to strengthening their psychological and communicative resources alongside their critical thinking and problem solving skills as it relates to obstacles to health in their lives.
About You
About You
First Name
Lacey
Last Name
Schwartz
twitter.com/truth_aid
Facebook Profile
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Truth Aid
Organization Website
Organization Phone
646.678.5906
Organization Address
27 West 24th St. Suite 10D, New York, NY 10010
Organization Country
United States, NY, New York County
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States, NY
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Mainstreaming prevention in young black men
What change do you want to bring to the world?
Prevention needs to be mainstreamed into the lives of young black men in order to take root. However, the social context that many young black men face make this goal particularly challenging. We would like to change this by empowering young black men to become more effective participants in their health and well-being. We will achieve this by providing an intensive summer preventive health program that uses a framework of resilience to strengthening their psychological and communicative resources alongside their critical thinking and problem solving skills as it relates to obstacles to health in their lives.
What are the primary activities of your project?
The Young Men's Health Leadership Institute is in its idea phase but it builds on lessons we have learned working with vulnerable youth in NYC public schools and Philadelphia community youth centers. The primary activity will be running a summer institute with a mentored internship component that helps them practice the skills they learn. More specifically that institute will training young men to: learn effective problem solving skills; enhance communication skills; improve health literacy; foster critical thinking about health; connect them to a wider social network of health supporters from the Truth Aid network; and strengthen their ability to mobilize personal and psychological resources in the face of adversity.
The overall goal is to help participants mobilize untapped personal, psychological, and communicative resources to use as a foundation for mainstreaming prevention in their lives.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
The exclusion that black men and boys experience from the mainstream of American life is a function of social context and a formidable challenge to prevention and wellness. This exclusion creates barriers that prevent young men from accessing resources and developing the necessary skills they need to lead healthy lives. This isolation is also compounded by disproportionate experiences with violence that leave some young men traumatized. For prevention to grow roots in this context it has to be radically different. Instead of brochures and individual counseling, it has to be tactile and holistic. It has to engage the senses, the mind, the body and the soul. The multimedia curriculum we use combined with mentorship and online network of peer support does just that. Participants literally feel the love. This is what makes our approach to prevention in this population so unique. Another innovation lies in applying the science of problem solving therapy to prevention and developing a language for "positive health" that builds on the lessons of positive psychology. Other programs and projects that target this particular group tend to focus on violence prevention as a a path to wellness instead of a more holistic frame that builds on resilience. Although we recognize that acknowledging violence is important and thinking through how to prevent it there is a great deal more to young black men's experiences that are just as important and integral to their health outcomes.
What stage is your project in?
Idea phase
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
Our work to date has revealed that engaging communities that have disproportionate experiences with trauma, violence and adversity requires methods that go well beyond conventional. This is what we try to do. The youth we have worked with in the NYC school system have experiences with foster care, have been disconnected from school in the past, and come from communities where violence is an all too common reality. They are 78% of African American or Latino heritage, and ages 16-18.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
Truth Aid was started by Dr. Mehret Mandefro during her internal medicine residency in the South Bronx as a means of raising awareness about the root causes of HIV in the African American community. Her research project in the South Bronx took her into the homes of her patients to learn about what often goes unsaid. During this work she realized that conversations about HIV prevention had to start with love, trust, identity, abuse, and support in order to make safe sex a reality. Her efforts to uncover this missing dialogue led to Truth Aid and a unique methodology that leverages media and technology to educate vulnerable populations about the social barriers they face. The organization has since expanded its focus beyond HIV/AIDS to include a host of social barriers to well being.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
Our programs with youth have been mainstreamed into the curriculum of a number of well-established community health programs as well as universities. The most successful of which is targeted at college students. Dr. Mandefro was actually asked to join the faculty of the George Washington School of Public Health's Department of Health Policy to help turn the Truth Aid curriculum into the a year-round course. The class she teaches builds on the curriculum from the working with you and is called Health and Social Change. It is a required class taught year round for public health majors. The film that features her work is also being used by over 1000 educational institutions around the world and has been viewed online and on Showtime to an audience of over 7.3 million viewers.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
101-1,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
Truth Aid has worked closely with college campuses from the its inception and has been building on this base. We will be releasing a film next year that will allows us to reach millions again.
Task 1
Hire and train facilitators to implement the curriculum.
Task 2
Finish designing the outreach guide to accompany the film we are releasing which is focused on race in America called Outside the Box.
Task 3
Host a series of community trainings to test the toolkit and outreach guide that has been developed.
Identify your 12-month impact milestone
We plan to have the film Outside the Box in distribution in 12 months and will use that exposure to help implement Young Black Men Leadership Institutes across the country with our partners.
Task 1
Finish editing the film and raising finishing funds.
Task 2
Carefully tie the lessons from the toolkit into the curriculum of the leadership institute.
Task 3
Publish and package the toolkits that will allows other community health advocates to implement the same program.
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
We will likely incorporate peer advocates that help facilitate the trainings and hopefully transition to a model that is strictly youth run.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
Recruitment in this population is a challenge for a host of reasons not least of which is the logistics of seeking approval to work with schools. In our experiences, building on the charter schools that are more open to letting new ideas in is the way to go. However, we have been successful in working in NYC public schools as well and will continue to build entry ways into the public school system.
Tell us about your partnerships
We are implementing this project in partnership with the Resilience Advocacy Project.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$50,001‐100,000
Explain your selections
We have been a volunteer organization for the past 2 years and are in the middle of our first fundraising campaign. We have raised $200,000 and plan to raise another $250,000 so that we can have full-time paid staff in charge of implementing our programs beginning Summer 2012. When Dr. Mandefro incorporated Truth Aid and obtained 501 c 3 status she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. As a RWJ Scholar, she obtained a grant for a pilot project that focused on communicating about health disparities called "Showing what is hard to tell". The money from this grant funded Truth Aid for its first two years.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
We plan on strengthening the project by recruiting talent. We would like to incorporate a component of the performing arts and have had great experiences working with actors who have the training to deliver information in a way that makes it easy for people with low levels of literacy to take it all in. Actors are great facilitators for health programs and we would like to target recruiting this population and training them. This will really strengthen the delivery of the content. We also plan to recruit an advisory board of individuals with specific expertise working with young black men to help inform our efforts along the way. Last but not least, we hope to produce content that can be packaged and delivered in ways that allow our model to be imported into locations that need this the most.
Challenges
Which barriers to health and well-being does your innovation address?
Please select up to three in order of relevancy to your project.
PRIMARY
Restrictive cultural norms
SECONDARY
Health behavior change
TERTIARY
Incentives for unhealthy living
Please describe how your innovation specifically tackles the barriers listed above.
Successful prevention requires combining behavioral intervention rooted in evidence-based science that targets the individual with interventions rooted in advocacy that target structures. This is a difficult balance for any one organization to achieve. However we have demonstrated success in helping bridge this gap by equipping vulnerable populations with the necessary skills to better navigate and effectively respond to environments that make prevention a challenge. In so doing, we help people mainstream prevention into their everyday lives. Our programs impact vulnerable communities by increasing the self-efficacy individuals have to successfully navigate the complexities of living in difficult circumstances characterized by lack of opportunity, poverty, and violence.
How are you growing the impact of your organization or initiative?
Please select up to three potential pathways in order of relevancy to you.
PRIMARY
Grown geographic reach: Within host country
SECONDARY
Enhanced existing impact through addition of complementary services
TERTIARY
Influenced other organizations and institutions through the spread of best practices
Please describe which of your growth activities are current or planned for the immediate future.
We are concentrating on geographic reach right now. Our implementing partners, the Resilience Advocacy Project, has an established network in New York City that we are using to build upon. Our experience in NYC has been on an invite-only basis to date. But we would like to approach the local city officials about expanding efforts to a small number of schools.
Do you collaborate with any of the following: (Check all that apply)
NGOs/Nonprofits, Academia/universities.
If yes, how have these collaborations helped your innovation to succeed?
These collaboration help feed the intervention with human capital! There have been so many talented students at all levels that have devoted their time, energy, and smarts to helping run our programs or develop our content. We could not have existed as a volunteer organization with out them. They have taken our lessons and materials into classrooms, churches, community centers, and even prisons.
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