Native STAND is a comprehensive curriculum for training peer educators that promotes healthy decision making for Native youth. All youth—including Native youth—face extreme pressures to fit in and belong. To make the best decisions for themselves, youth need factual, science-based information delivered to them in a way they can relate to, by people who they can trust and feel comfortable talking to. Peer educators can fill this important role.
Native STAND is adapted from STAND—Students Together Against Negative Decisions—a peer educator curriculum developed for youth in rural Georgia. It has been evaluated and is theoretically based, using both the Transtheoretical Model (Stages of Change) and the Diffusion of Innovations Model (identifying and relying on popular opinion leaders to promote change). Its approach is comprehensive and skills-based, and includes STD, HIV, and teen pregnancy prevention, as well as drug and alcohol issues and dating violence. Sessions focus on positive personal development; including team building, diversity, self-esteem, goals and values, decision making, negotiation and refusal skills, peer educator skills, and effective communications.
The curriculum was designed to meet the needs of today’s Native youth. It honors tradition and culture at the same time that it meets today’s Native youth where they are: walking between two different—but interconnected—worlds. While Native STAND acknowledges that Native youth face many of the same challenges as mainstream youth, it embraces the power of traditional teachings and cultural strengths that Native youth have within themselves and their communities.
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| PSA - It's always a good day to be Indigenous | ||||
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