Contact Name
Barbara Dietsch
562-799-5126
bdietsc@WestEd.org

By Bill Albert

When it comes to preventing teen pregnancy, there has been much to celebrate in recent years. Declining teen pregnancy and birth rates nationwide are technicolor evidence that teen pregnancy is not inevitable. In an effort to assist people in communities around the country who want to help continue this encouraging trend, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy recently published, Get Organized: A Guide to Preventing Teen Pregnancy.

Individuals and communities around the country increasingly recognize that helping teens avoid pregnancy can’t be accomplished by any single program or strategy. Because the causes of teen pregnancy are complicated and overlapping, solutions must have many parts and approaches. This means doing things differently: getting new people and organizations involved, committing for the long term, and measuring carefully the effectiveness of programs. Get Organized is a practical manual to do just that. The three-volume, 17-chapter publication covers a lot of ground – from providing strategies for involving boys and men and for reaching out to religious leaders, to practical advice about how to raise money and to conduct program evaluation. At the same time, Get Organized is easy to read and simple to use, with many checklists and examples from promising programs around the country.

Developed with the support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies, Get Organized is based on several overarching principles:

1. Multiple, mutually complementary strategies are more likely to make a difference. There are no easy answers to the problem of teen pregnancy. As the first chapter of Get Organized – "Promising Approaches to Preventing Teen Pregnancy" – notes, "programs that provide multiple avenues for action, including positive youth development activities, show the most promise."
2. Involving new partners, like the business community, or working with traditional partners in new ways, enhances any prevention strategy. It is important to note, again, that Get Organized was published in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Johnson and Johnson Family of Companies. This collaboration is particularly fitting because bringing together the resources and talents of government, business, and the private nonprofit sector is at the heart of the message of Get Organized.
3. Preventing teen pregnancy requires long-term, intense effort. One six-week program will not have much lasting effect, nor will a couple of classroom hours. And, since new teens arrive on the scene every year, prevention efforts must be constantly reinvented.
4. Communities can unite around the need to address teen pregnancy without expecting unanimity about ways to prevent it. Different organizations and members of the community can adopt different strategies to reach the same end – fewer pregnant teens. Chapter 17 – "Moving Forward in the Face of Conflict" – notes that some strategies may even seem to conflict with each other, and that may be fine. Teen pregnancy is a complicated – even messy – problem, and "messy" strategies can often be useful.
5. Parents have important influences on their children’s decisions about sexual behavior. They should be supported in their roles and be central to any large-scale effort to prevent teen pregnancy. "It is ongoing sustained communication between parents and their teens that helps prevent teen pregnancy as well as a host of other risky behaviors," notes chapter six of Get Organized – "Involving Parents and Other Adults in Teen Pregnancy Prevention."
6. Needless to say, involving teens themselves – the "target audience" – is always essential.
7. Focusing on boys and young men is critical to any effort to prevent teen pregnancy. Girls are indeed the ones who get pregnant, but it takes two to cause a pregnancy.

Get Organized reflects the expertise of its authors – names long associated with teen pregnancy prevention – including Susan Philliber, Claire Brindis, Leslie Kantor, and Joy Dryfoos and Campaign staffers Tamara Kreinin, Bill Smith, and John Hutchins. The publication is divided into three complementary volumes:

Volume I: Focusing on the Kids opens with an overview of the promising programs that can help prevent teen pregnancy. The other chapters explain how to tailor programs to stages of adolescent development, create interventions for girls, involve boys and young men in prevention efforts, and involve young people themselves in developing and implementing programs.

Volume II: Involving the Key Players focuses on the roles of traditional participants in prevention efforts, like schools and health care professionals, as well as some often overlooked players, including faith leaders, the business community, and parents.

Volume III: Making It Happen concentrates on the logistics of developing a state or local coalition – or any major effort – to prevent teen pregnancy, including involving the community, assessing the needs of the community, planning, fundraising, working with the media, evaluating initiatives, and dealing with conflict.

Despite this wealth of information, Get Organized is easy to navigate. Each chapter follows a similar format. A tab divider provides a roadmap on the information contained in each chapter and provides a thumbnail sketch of the chapter’s key ideas. All chapters are replete with easy-to-read-and-use checklists, boxes, and nuggets of factual information. Each chapter also includes boxes labeled "Research Notes," "Field Notes," and "Case in Point" – offering useful findings from research studies, advice from practitioners in the field, and illustrations of specific issues with real-life examples. Lastly, each chapter concludes with a list of helpful references and resources.

We at the National Campaign believe that Get Organized will be an invaluable tool both for those who have been working for years in the field of teen pregnancy prevention and people who are new to this critically important issue. Good work is being done around the country to prevent teen pregnancy. Our fondest hope is that Get Organized serves to both catalyze new initiatives and reinvigorate existing ones.

Bill Albert is Director of Communications and Publications at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Washington, D.C. The Campaign’s website is www.teenpregnancy.org.