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Chapter 7:
Summary and Conclusions on Group and Individual Outreach Activities in the
Adolescent SPNS Projects
In the course of building their service programs, the 10 adolescent SPNS projects have found outreach both to individuals and to agencies to be a necessary activity. Building relationships with other agencies – or strengthening relationships that existed at the start of the SPNS projects – helps to ensure that there is a flow of clients into the program. Agencies can help the SPNS project by making referrals, by allowing the SPNS project to recruit from among appropriate clients in the linked agency, and by expanding the network of the SPNS project. In addition, the linked agencies are a source of expertise, feedback, and counsel.
In addition to agency outreach, the 10 adolescent SPNS projects also found it useful to make direct outreach to individuals. Such outreach efforts ranged from such activities as answering phone inquiries and handing out brochures in areas frequented by target youth to much more intensive activities related to street outreach to these hard-to-find populations.
In aggregate, the 10 adolescent SPNS projects accomplished the following over a period of slightly more than two years.
A total of 870 formal and informal presentations were made to agencies and groups ranging from 1 to 1,750 participants. Through these presentations, an estimated 14,592 males and 17,762 females received information on topics ranging from HIV risk factors to youth service systems to current state-of-the-art treatments. The individuals reached through these presentations were very diverse in their ages, ethnic/racial identities, and professional-experiential backgrounds.
A total of 11,074 low-intensity individual outreach sessions were held. Such sessions ranged from phone contacts to brief information and referral sessions in settings as diverse as bars, health fairs, and group prevention sessions.
A total of 5,036 high-intensity individual outreach sessions were held (with 3,995 individuals). These sessions involved repeated and in-depth attempts to recruit appropriate youth into services.
The single most profound effect of the outreach efforts of the 10 projects was to ensure that youth living with HIV or at-high-risk-for-HIV were enrolled in appropriate services. The characteristics of the youth enrolled in the program are addressed further in the second report in this series. The third report in the series details the treatment experiences and outcomes for the youth. The fourth volume is a technical appendix that will provide more sophisticated statistical models.
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