Hartford Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative 2010-2015

Hartford Action Plan based this on our Breaking the Cycle model and is pleased to have authored this winning grant.

The City of Hartford, Department of Health and Human Services (HHHS) is the applicant organization and will manage all project activities for a five-year Office of Adolescent Health (OAH) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Integrating Services, Programs, and Strategies through Community-wide Initiatives grant. Its lead collaborating partner is Hartford Action Plan on Infant Health (HAP), a non-profit grassroots agency that has been serving Hartford for 26 years and providing teen pregnancy prevention programs for the last 15 years. The proposed five-year initiative will serve a minimum of 800 new youth each year for 4 years for a total goal of 3200 youth.  These youth are low-income African-American and Hispanic male and female teens ages 13-19 residing in the City of Hartford. HHHS and HAP will partner with  the following agencies: (1) City of Hartford Office of Youth Services (HOYS), whose mission is to build and strengthen youth service systems that prepare Hartford youth to be productive, self-sufficient adults; (2) Planned Parenthood of Southern New England (PPSNE), the largest provider of reproductive health care in Connecticut and the state’s leading agency in sexuality education and training and the grantee for the federal Title X, Title XX and state Department of Public Health family planning programs in Connecticut; (3) Hartford Public School System, which includes the school-based health clinics in the city's three high schools; (4) at least six of the city's youth-serving organizations, including two of the city's largest agencies – the Community Renewal Team, accredited by the  Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and the Urban League of Greater Hartford, one of the largest direct social services agencies in New England; and (5) six Hartford health clinics.

Our vision is a community collaboration that will significantly decrease the rates of pregnancy, STI’s and HIV among the teen population of Hartford.  We envision a city in which teenagers are educated and equipped to make informed choices about their futures and every young person is healthy and self sufficient before deciding to become a parent . What will make this collaboration a success, and in the long run sustainable, is the combination of experience, expertise and community connections that the partners bring to this project. Our combined goal for this project is to build a foundation for a successful and sustainable city-wide partnership that will significantly decrease the rates of pregnancy, STI’s and HIV among the teen population of Hartford. 

In this collaboration, each of the four major partners (HHHS, HAP, HOYS and PPSNE) has a significant role and contribution to make.  Hartford Action Plan (HAP) has experience developing and implementing multi-component community wide teen pregnancy prevention programs.  City of Hartford Department of Health and Human Services (HHHS) and City of Hartford Office of Youth Services (HOYS) have experience designing, implementing and evaluating community-wide efforts, and they play a critically important role in  creating long term institutional and organizational sustainability. Both HAP and Planned Parenthood of Southern New England (PPSNE) have experience with evidence informed and evidence based teen pregnancy prevention programs and efforts to create and promote state and local strategies that address adolescent reproductive health.