Our Adolescent Health portfolio has seen its share of flexibility during 2021! We’ve had to establish and maintain relationships with schools, community organizations and students, all in the midst of adjusting to COVID-19 protocols and the devastating impacts of Hurricane Ida, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. During these times, our team relied on one another to be empathetic, supportive and compassionate, and to even deliver a touch of tough love sometimes when it was needed. Ultimately, we believe that when one works in a field of service such as education, it’s often up to the individuals to show up at their best, regardless of the external circumstances, and give all they’ve got to meet the objective at hand. And that is truly what our Adolescent Health team has done this year, time and time again. With a ton of hardship surrounding us, we were able to find the silver linings and make the most of them and meet—and even exceed!—all of our internal goals. Although we are "adolescent health,” we are also data-driven, so the team is privy to all the measures of success that we are federally obligated to achieve and were constantly informed them about where we stood and what's coming down the pipeline, and we offered support to each other where we could. But really, our educators held their ground, especially with us being understaffed. They understood the assignment and embodied our internal slogan that "we do it for the kids.” No matter what, we refuse to let things fall through the cracks when it comes to the kids--that's how and why we do what we do.

This year we’ve seen schools have to make the difficult decision to close their doors due to major structural damage from Hurricane Ida. We’ve had to navigate the ever-changing landscape of implementation and adapt to what works best for each school, each implementation, sometimes delivering our lessons in person, other times teaching remotely. We came together to do something about what was happening in Region 3 after Hurricane Ida--being able to provide something tangible to them really mattered to us because our team was teaching there right before the storm. We held a lot of individual and team check-ins to ensure that people had adequate time to process the environmental and personal issues that everyone was feeling and dealing with. And even with hardship and loss on our own team, we’ve worked hard to show up for the behavioral and emotional needs youth are experiencing due to the general stress of being young on top of prolonged separation from their friends (and sometimes family), economic hardship and the loss of loved ones and many other folks in their communities. Whether we interacted with youth in-person or virtually, we strove to continue our work with as few interruptions as possible, and always move towards the ultimate goal of doing what’s best for youth and the health of our community.

Thanks to these extra efforts we are extremely proud to say that through our BY-LA 2.0 program we were able to reach over 1,000 students this year at 8 sites through a total of 44 cycles/cohorts of students in both the Greater New Orleans and East Baton Rouge areas!

For our partners in Baton Rouge, Family Road of Greater Baton Rouge, we checked in with each other on at least a weekly basis. We trained them in early October and did what we could to ensure that they felt prepared. One very successful tactic was utilizing a Peer Mentorship approach to connect one of our veteran educators with their newly trained team so they could have someone to bounce ideas off of. It's truly a collaborative relationship, and they are really integral to the work we do (and do it with less staff than IWES), so we are truly grateful for this amazing partnership.

Besides implementation we were also extremely busy creating a brand new initiative, the Louisiana Youth Health Justice Council, which is a dynamic and downright impressive group of nine passionate youth across the Southeast regions of the state that are actively pushing us and themselves to continue advocacy efforts to move comprehensive sex education policies forward in Louisiana and further institutionalize sex education!

Because of all we’ve learned and accomplished in 2021, our team is motivated to achieve even more in the new year. We want to take a moment to thank all of our school-based and community partners throughout Southeast Louisiana. We couldn't have done half of this work without your support, patience and understanding. Thank you to everyone that contributed to our Adolescent Health portfolio, and here’s to another successful year!

To get in touch with our Adolescent Health portfolio, reach out to our Program Manager Ashley Everett, MPH.