Grooming Teen Ambassadors for Health

Julie Straw 12MPH has sought to reduce health disparities for most of her life. During her formative years in Michigan, she went on mission trips to Bolivia and Uganda and worked with inner-city youth in Detroit. In college, she taught hiv modules to orphaned teens in South Africa.

At Rollins, her interests spawned the Community Health Ambassador (CHA) program to train local teens as peer health educators. Straw partnered with the Good Samaritan Health Center in West Atlanta to create the program under the auspices of the Emory Public Health Training Center. Established in 2010, the center is a learning community that builds competence in the domestic public health workforce, in part by enabling students to work in underserved areas. Straw was the first RSPH student awarded a summer field placement in Georgia by the center. Drawn to Good Samaritan at a Rollins career fair, she developed the CHA program to fill a need for encouraging healthy relationships among teens.

Straw worked with community members to organize the CHA program and cover topics identified by teens and their parents: dating violence, healthy eating, HIV prevention and stigma, safe sex, mental illness and suicide, substance abuse, and peer and gang violence. Students graduated from the program after eight weeks.

“Julie took on an incredibly complex task of developing and executing a mentorship program,” says William Warren 79M, president and founder of Good Samaritan. “The teens who participated truly seemed to enjoy their experience. If they enjoy it, then they likely will remember what they were taught and carry these lessons through life.”—PA