Native STAND Curriculum
Native STAND is a comprehensive curriculum for training peer educator 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.
The curriculum was developed by a multi-disciplinary workgroup that included Native youth, a Native elder, public health and youth development experts, and health curriculum developers. It is 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.
Native STAND is adapted from STAND—Students Together Against Negative Decisions—a peer educator curriculum developed for youth in rural Georgia. It 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. Participating students are identified by their peers; the process ensures that nominees come from many social groups and represent diverse cliques.
Pilot sites must make a strong commitment to implementing Native STAND. It is designed as 29 sessions that last appx 1.5 hours each, however, it can be modified to meet a wide range of settings and circumstances (e.g., in-school, after school, summer program, Saturday program, boarding school evening programming). Sites identify two adults who are well-respected by the youth to serve as facilitators. The facilitators must have the full support of the site to implement the full Native STAND curriculum.
The Native STAND developers are in the process of identifying four pilot sites from across Indian Country. These sites will receive considerable support and technical assistance during the one-year pilot phase (the 2009-2010 school year). The pilot sites will participate in the formal evaluation of Native STAND curriculum.
To learn more about Native STAND or to be considered as a pilot site, contact:
Dana Cropper Williams
Native STAND
c/o National Coalition of STD Directors
(202) 842-4660