Community Mobilization

From 2010 to 2015, CDC, the federal Office of Adolescent Health (OAH), and the Office of Population Affairs collaborated to demonstrate the effectiveness of innovative, multicomponent, communitywide initiatives in reducing rates of teen pregnancy and births in communities with the highest rates, with a focus on reaching African American and Latino or Hispanic young people aged 15 to 19 years.

A key component of the communitywide initiatives, community mobilization involves engaging all sectors of the population in a communitywide effort to address teen pregnancy prevention. Community mobilization supports the sustainability of teen pregnancy prevention efforts by empowering community members and groups to take action to facilitate change. This component includes mobilizing necessary resources, disseminating information, generating support, and fostering cooperation across public and private sectors in the community.

The awardees, nine state-and community-based organizations and five national organizations, along with CDC and OAH, collaboratively developed many valuable community mobilization tools and resources that may be useful for other teen pregnancy prevention initiatives:

Webinars

It Takes a Village: Strategies for Community Mobilization for TPP Programs.  Webinar hosted by OAH and CDC grantees on July 30, 2015.  (On OAH Teen Pregnancy Prevention Resource Center)
Slides[PDF – 786KB], Audio, Transcript [PDF – 130KB]

Strategies

• Community Mobilization Strategies Guided by Best Practice [PDF – 116KB] – This document summarizes 14 key strategies drawn from best practices in community mobilization, collaborative partnerships, and coalition-building. Advocates for Youth was the national organization funded to provide training on community mobilization to the state- and community-based grantees implementing these initiatives; working closely with CDC, they developed this document in 2014.