Street Smart is an intensive HIV/AIDS and STI prevention program for youth whose behaviors place them at risk of becoming infected. Life circumstances define risk for some youth; living on the street or in a slum, not attending school, or being an AIDS orphan increases the potential for risky behavior. The Street Smart program is designed for runaway and homeless youth in the United States, yet it can be easily adapted for youth in other settings. This version of the program has been adapted for street and slum youth in Kampala, Uganda. The modified program is the product of extensive collaboration among researchers, staff from public and private agencies serving street and slum youth in Kampala, as well as youth from the community.
The participants will acquire current information about HIV/AIDS, its transmission and assessing how great the risk for HIV is for the each of them. Then the participants will be in a better position to determine the pros and cons of getting an HIV test. This training encourages participants to envision a future achieving the goals they have set. Emphasis is placed on the youths’ potential for success and happiness, and how they can reach these goals.
This Street Smart manual aims to have participants know the relative safety of different sexual behaviors, assess the safety of their own sexual behavior, and start to learn how to avoid sexual risk.
The purpose of this session is to provide participants an understanding of why using condoms is essential to practicing safer sex. Participants will be able to evaluate condoms, demonstrate skills in using both male and female condoms, and learn to decrease their anxiety about condom use.
The main point of this session is for the participants to be able to identify how drugs and alcohol affect their thinking and choices. The model is presented here in order to help potential users understand that what they must control are the triggers that stimulate drug thoughts and beliefs. Once the thoughts and beliefs are activated, stopping the movement toward cravings and use is extremely difficult.
This session introduces participants to more formal ways of coping and assumes that it is useful to understand what coping is designed to do: reduce uncomfortable feelings and fix situations. It is also assumed that exposing participants to a wide range of coping strategies and actions will stimulate them to try different approaches and to develop a larger coping repertoire. The main point of this session is for participants to be able to identify different coping styles in tough situations, and to problem solve solutions.
The main point of this session is for the participants to learn how to stand up for their own personal values. A lack of social skills may prevent a teenager from initiating a relationship with someone desirable. These skill deficits may result in staying with easy but unsafe relationships. Therefore, practicing the skills of starting conversations and making new friends is included.
The main point of this session is for participants to learn how to use their thoughts and self-talk to help them make safer decisions. Knowing how to prepare oneself for a difficult situation and then to use self-talk to guide one through it has been demonstrated to be a very effective coping mechanism. Youth can learn self-talk for the preparation, confrontation, overwhelming, and evaluation phases of a conflict.
The main point of this session is for the participants to figure out why they engage in risky behaviors, and to learn how to argue against their rationalizations. At this point, it is important to provide the participants with an opportunity to pull all of the experiences in the training together. Since the sessions are ending and the formal group will be disbanding, it is important that the participants engage in a final group effort using their creativity, and experience a sense of closure.