When I first started at the Annex, I was a facilitator of an evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention program, the Teen Outreach Program (TOP). Given that I had just finished my MPH where we spent a great deal of time discussing the value of evidence-based programs, I was pretty jazzed to be involved with one myself. We were implementing TOP through federal funding for teen pregnancy prevention, yet the TOP program is a youth development program that had little sexuality content. I hadn't spent a great deal of time prior to starting at the Annex thinking about the intersection of positive youth development and sexuality education, and so facilitating TOP was a big learning experience for me as I integrated the two. I think I was a little confused early on about how I could possibly be working to improve sexual health without ever talking about sexual health. But now, imagining implementing and facilitating sexuality education without doing it through a positive youth development lens seems as silly as not thinking of sexuality as a birth to death, complex, holistic concept.
These days we're no long implementing TOP, but we are funded to implement a different evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention (and broader sexual risk-taking prevention) program called Project AIM. The program uses focuses on middle-school aged youth imagining a positive potential future self, and then building motivation to safeguard that imagined self. Myself and my coworkers, as well as others in Hennepin County, are currently in year 2 of our implementation of Project AIM. While I have spent a lot of time thinking about youth development and sexual health promotion, I find myself still learning and reflecting about this through our implementation of Project AIM.
I'm very excited because the program and our work is being highlighted in an article on Healthy You, Healthy Hennepin, an online public health magazine. And, it just was published! It says a lot about the program as well as the work Better Together Hennepin and the Annex have been doing, which is great! I hope that more people get engaged with our work, and expand their understanding of the range of programming designed to decrease sexual risk-taking behavior.