Partnering to reduce the HIV/AIDS rate and substance abuse

By Amy Geiszler-Jones

Inside WSU

A WSU faculty member and three community groups have partnered to offer an HIV and substance abuse prevention program for African-American youth. Shown, left to right, are the women heading the project: Rhonda Lewis, an assistant professor of psychology, Brenda McDonald of the Boys and Girls Clubs, Edith Knox of the Knox Center and Arneatha Martin of the Center for Health and Wellness.

New drug treatments are helping reduce AIDS deaths nationwide, but the disease is still ravaging the African-American population.

While blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for 49 percent of the AIDS deaths in 1998, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bolstered by $156 million in funding initiated by the Congressional Black Caucus, agencies and programs nationwide are working to raise awareness and to increase HIV prevention efforts among minority groups through a variety of federally funded projects.

In Wichita, a WSU psychology faculty member and three community groups are joining the effort.

Rhonda Lewis, an assistant professor of psychology, is spearheading the project that will target African-American youth, ages 13-19. She received a three-year grant, with annual funding of more than $220,000, from the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, a subdivision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Wichita project is one of 48 funded through this particular program and the only one in Kansas.

"Our teen-agers are our future," says Brenda McDonald from the Boys and Girls Clubs, about the project’s importance. "We expect them to be our future leaders, and it’s up to us to prepare them for a positive, healthy lifestyle."

Statistics show that both unprotected sex and substance abuse are risk factors associated with HIV infection. "Many people who are diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in their 20s contracted the virus as adolescents," Lewis wrote in her grant proposal.

Lewis has partnered with three community agencies that bring ideal characteristics to the project, she says.

The highly visible Boys and Girls Clubs of South Central Kansas will recruit 150 youth each year. Facilitators from the Knox Center, already trained in substance abuse and HIV prevention, will lead the teens through a five-hour program. And the Center for Health and Wellness, which will offer free physicals to participants as an incentive, will reinforce the messages about healthy behavior when the youth come to the clinic located on 21st Street.

As the project’s evaluator, Lewis will collect and analyze the data.

The 150 teens will be divided into three groups of 50 — one receiving HIV information and skills on reducing risks for HIV infection, another information and skills on reducing risks for HIV infection and substance abuse, and the last will concentrate on healthy behavior overall. Once they’ve finished the curriculum, Lewis will do follow-up surveys at the three-, six- and 12-month marks.

The project will use the "Be Proud, Be Responsible" HIV awareness curriculum — which emphasizes positive, less risky behavior — that proved successful in New Jersey. Through presentations, role-playing and videos, the curriculum encourages such things as condom usage, lowering the number of sexual partners and activity, and general knowledge about HIV.

Lewis and her project partners, however, are adding some other elements: a media campaign designed by the teens in the project and the substance abuse component.

"You need to have a creative element to reach the masses," says McDonald, development director for the Boys and Girls Clubs, about the media campaign. "Back in the day, we’d just sit and listen to the preacher or the teacher. Now we have to be more creative. To borrow a phrase from Malcolm X, ‘by any means necessary.’"

Recruitment for the program is already under way, and teens seem to be excited to be involved, McDonald says. Helping design a media campaign seems to be one of the drawing cards. Each participant also receives $100.

Allowing the teens to come up with the message will have a greater impact on their peers, McDonald says.

"Within the African-American teen-age population in Wichita, there’s a need to seriously address issues we’re concerned about. This is an opportunity for them (the youth) to have a valued voice in their lives and those of their parents, family and community."

The media campaign will focus on positive messages. "We don’t need to support anything negative," says McDonald. "We’ll flip the script." For example, instead of citing how many kids use drugs, it would emphasize how many don’t.