Health and Opportunity Partnership (HOPE)

Johns Hopkins University: Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention

Topics:
Healthy Youth | Mental Health

The center’s Health and Opportunity Partnership (HOPE) project is exploring whether job training facilities for young people can be good settings for addressing the health risks and health care needs of out-of-school youth. This population of 16–21 year olds are more likely than youth who have completed high school to lack health insurance or access to health care; engage in substance use; suffer from depression; be exposed to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases; encounter peer violence; and become teenaged parents. About 22% of youth in East Baltimore have dropped out of high school and are not employed.

An existing youth employment program in Baltimore, Youth Opportunity (YO!), offers job training and high school education certificate programs (GED) to prepare out-of-school youth for college or well-paying jobs. There are several YO! programs in Baltimore. The center and its collaborators (including the Baltimore City Health Department, the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Development, the YO! program, and program participants) are designing health interventions focused on mental health and developing strategies to integrate them into job training programs. Intervention strategies include conducting youth assessments of existing community mental health services, training case managers who work at YO! programs to identify and address students’ mental health issues, and developing a peer support program.

Researchers will survey and interview student and staff participants from one YO! program before and after the intervention. If the before and after design uncovers positive outcomes such as reduced health risk behaviors among participating students, and improved job satisfaction and morale among YO! program staff, researchers will develop a design to compare outcomes of intervention participants to that of comparable youth in other, non-intervention YO! programs in Baltimore.

 

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