Native Youth

Culturally-meaningful models of interventions and strong internal capacity rooted in local needs and realities are needed to support communities in their efforts to educate and empower young people in the development of healthy ideas, attitudes, and behaviors regarding sexuality and sexual health. 

American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian communities are working to develop their own capacity to conceive and implement health promotion and disease prevention programs to prevent the spread of HIV and related diseases from further reducing Native populations. 

Over the years, NNAAPC has worked with these Native communities to reach Native youth. Our efforts include HIV prevention education, media literacy education and programs geared at developing leadership skills in Native youth. Additionally, NNAAPC has developed community-based HIV prevention campaigns targeting Native youth.

NNAAPC has played an active, encouraging role in facilitating program development and expansion, offering guidance by example and mentoring, thereby enabling community-based, youth-serving organizational leaders to shine and to take ownership of positive programmatic changes. 

By providing youth capacity-building activities, NNAAPC will continue to strengthen local-level youth organizations, to build broad, nationwide strategies and programs to support youth-serving agencies whose goal is to reduce sexual risk behaviors that lead to HIV infection. 

To find out more information about these programs, please contact Jay Macedo, Director of Special Projects, at (720) 382-2244 jmacedo@nnaapc.org.