Youth United Through Health Education (Y.U.T.H.E.)

SF. Don’t Think Know (DTK) is a free home testing service/platform that allows young women, transmen, or any person with a vagina to order an STI testing kit for gonorrhea and chlamydia in San Francisco.  It is a safe and easy way to keep up with your routine health screenings in the comforts of your own home, or any other space.

Visit our website @ Home | Don't Think Know | DontThinkKnow.org

YUTHE is a program of the Community Health Equity & Promotion Branch of SFDPH. The YUTHE Program is also a professional development and peer education internship designed to introduce youth and young adults to the field of Public Health and address health disparities in San Francisco. Staff is trained to promote sexual health using a culturally appropriate approach to help reduce health disparities among African American youth in San Francisco; as well as help youth and young adults learn how to protect themselves from HIV and other STIs. The goal of the program is for the Intern to spend approximately one (1) to two (2) years in the position to gain a wide range of public health knowledge and on the job skills, to increase STI screening among sexually active adolescents in San Francisco and to use preventive health services to ultimately decrease the rates of STIs and reduce health disparities.

The YUTHE Program began in 1996.

The YUTHE Program was started by the San Francisco Department of Public Health - STD Prevention & Control Division in collaboration with the University of California San Francisco Department of Pediatrics / Division of Adolescent Medicine.

The YUTHE program was developed to address the high rates of sexually transmitted diseases among African American teenagers living in or hanging out in Bayview Hunters Point.

The YUTHE Program chose Bayview Hunters Point because that neighborhood has the highest rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea among teenagers than any other neighborhood in the city.

We Surveyed the community. 

• First, the YUTHE Program staff realized they needed to get some information from the youth that lived in Bayview Hunters Point before they did anything in the community.
• The staff developed a survey with a lot of questions about who they were, if attended school, family life, sexuality, STDs, family planning, knowledge of pregnancy and where they accessed healthcare.  This survey was asked to teenagers over the phone.
• We hired a professional agency that does telephone surveys on the phone to make thousands of phone calls to reach 302 youth (136 males & 166 females) 12 –18 yrs. of age that lived in Bayview Hunters Point.

What did the YUTHE Program do with the information from the survey?

• First, the YUTHE Program Management staff hired 4 youth from the Bayview Hunters Point community.
• We trained the staff in the basics of the 8 most common STDs; presentations skills; anatomy & physiology, HIV, risk reduction and methods of how to answer questions comfortably about STDs, sex, prevention and professionalism.
• We trained the youth staff as peer educators to conduct street outreach in all of the areas of Hunters Point in a safe, respectful and productive manner.
• The staff developed materials to hand out in the community that addressed health issues.  They field tested the material in the community to see if youth would like them before money was spent on printing.
• The staff began conducting street outreach in 1997 in Bayview Hunters Point.  They passed out condoms and lubricant to all young people ages 12 –22  (specifically African Americans).
• They conducted STD testing on three street corners in BVHP, utilizing the new urine test for gonorrhea and chlamydia.  The staff made arrangements with agencies near their information table set-up to allow the youth to use their bathroom.  We gave two movie tickets as incentives for testing.  We also followed up with the individuals that were positive for chlamydia or gonorrhea.

After the evaluation of the YUTHE Program in 2001, it became evident that the YUTHE Program, along with their outreach and prevention workshops created better knowledge of STDs and sexual health among the target population we serve.