Combating HIV & AIDS Close to Home

World AIDS Day takes place every year on December 1st and serves world-wide as an opportunity to raise awareness and focus attention on the global AIDS epidemic. Since 2004, GHA has partnered with the DeKalb County School System to use this occasion to educate young people about HIV/AIDS issues, using peer-to-peer presentations and in-school programs to reach middle and high school students. The School-based AIDS Awareness and Prevention Program includes:

Training & Education: We provide school counselors with ideas, guidance, materials, and a forum for asking questions and sharing and comparing notes with their peers.

Project development: The counselors return to their schools and work with their “Peer Helpers” – a group of about 20 student leaders – who develop an in-school project for World AIDS Day.

Mini-Grants: Each participating school may apply to GHA for a mini-grant to support their project.

World AIDS Day activities: In the six years of this program, students have come up with numerous creative ways to get across their messages about HIV education, awareness, and advocacy. Past projects have incorporated poetry slams, essay contests, student assemblies, PA announcements, infomercials, plays and performances, quizzes and games, displays, guest speakers, fundraisers, artwork, and more. Activities usually focus on the week leading up to or following the December 1st commemoration.

Follow-up: We encourage the schools and counselors to extend the awareness and education activities throughout the school year, and we follow up with each school during the year to offer continued support and materials and to see what else they are accomplishing.

The program goals are: (a) to reinforce existing prevention efforts, improve HIV awareness, and reduce high-risk behavior among students in DeKalb County through education, awareness, and advocacy; and (b) to support student leaders as effective HIV-prevention activists and advocates by helping them to create and plan HIV awareness and prevention activities in their schools. Read about the activities at one local school.

Results: Since 2004, the program has supported awareness and prevention efforts in an average of 15 DeKalb County schools a year, training hundreds of peer educators and counselors to implement activities in their schools reaching at least 10,000-15,000 students each year.

Exchanging fluids at Stephenson Middle School in Stone Mt., GA