When we had our very first meeting with the staff here at CDPH, they already had an idea of what they were interested in having us do for our capstone project. We were to work with a Masters of Public Health student on a Teen Halloween educational program. It would be a party with food, music, prizes, but also a healthy dose of reproductive health education.
All semester we planned our educational activities. We determined that each FPB student would focus on a different area of reproductive health and have an activity about it. Leah focused on different forms of birth control. AJ focused on condom use and STI prevention, while I focused on teaching about the actual STIs. For my activity I had a "wheel of misfortune", where the participant would spin and if they landed on an STI we would discuss it. If they landed on "got tested" or "used a condom" they got another raffle ticket for our prize drawing at the end. The activity actually went pretty well and the teens actually seemed pretty interested. They were really interested in the gross pictures of STIs.
All in all the event turned out to be more successful than I thought it was going to be. Though we didn't get a huge number of participants, the ones we did have were very interested and receptive to our education efforts. The most interesting participant we had was an 18 year old who already had two children. She was really interested in talking to Leah about contraceptive methods and I feel like our event really helped her make decisions for her reproductive health. Though we may not have made a radical change in public health with our project, we did make a small impact in the lives of a few teens, which to me was very rewarding.
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