This issue summarizes the first report in a series that evaluates the efforts of 10 HRSA/HAB's SPNS Adolescent Care Projects. It examines the outreach activities that these projects used during their first two years of funding. The projects conduct outreach to agencies, groups, and individuals, with the goal of enhancing their programs by increasing awareness of, and linking individual youth to, community services.

Agency outreach is accomplished by attending planning council, advisory board, and service provider networking meetings, as well as by providing training to other providers, facilitating interagency referrals, and participating in local and national forums to increase program visibility. To assist their outreach efforts, a number of programs also use radio, television, and newspaper advertisements. By building relationships with other agencies, HRSA/HAB's SPNS Adolescent Care Projects ensure a steady flow of clients into their programs. Conversely, linked agencies can help the adolescent care projects by making referrals, increasing recruitment of appropriate clients, expanding each project’s network, and providing feedback and advice.

Individual "street" outreach is provided in a range of settings, including drop-in centers, bars and clubs, needle exchange sites, and other locations where youth congregate or "hang out." Many of these contacts involve discussing "hassles," frequently about items that seem peripheral to the delivery of HIV services. Yet addressing such complaints is necessary to gain the trust of potential service recipients. While the types of outreach methods differ from site to site, employing appropriate, consistent outreach can help guarantee that the population of targeted youth is recruited into the model programs and linked to appropriate care.

In the course of building their programs, the adolescent care projects found that both individual and agency outreach are essential. Direct outreach to individuals, which ranged from answering phone inquiries and handing out brochures in areas frequented by targeted youth to much more intensive street outreach activities for hard-to-find populations, was extremely effective. In fact, 21,083 low-intensity and 8,947 high-intensity individual outreach contacts were made between December 1993 and February 1998. A total of 1,815 agency outreach presentations also were made, most of which targeted health and social service providers (although a large percentage directly targeted youth).

While all of the projects differ from one another according to geographic needs and targeted youth populations, they all share a clear consensus about the importance of outreach in successfully enhancing program services and increasing program enrollment. In the final analysis, the single most profound effect of the projects’ outreach efforts was to ensure that youth living with HIV or at high-risk for HIV were enrolled in appropriate services.

For a complete copy of "Outreach Activities in 10 Adolescent-Targeted Projects for HIV/AIDS Services: A Cross-Cutting Evaluation of the Health Resources and Services Administration Special Projects of National Significance Program," please contact The Measurement Group, or visit the World Wide Web at www.TheMeasurementGroup.com.

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