Making Health a Shared Value of Youth Culture (The HAVOYCE Project)

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Investigator: Dean Schillinger, MD
Sponsor: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Location(s): United States

Description

Health As a shared Value Of Youth CulturE (HAVOYCE) is a campaign to eradicate Type 2 diabetes (T2D) in youth by inspiring youth to become powerful messengers who use the art of spoken word to shift mindsets and expectations away from “shame and blame” towards "the bigger picture": reversing T2D’s social and environmental drivers. The researchers are assessing whether the HAVOYCE arts-based public health literacy program: (1) shifts mindsets and expectations towards a socio-ecological understanding of T2D and its related disparities (2) leads to a greater sense of community belonging and affiliation and (3) generates more civic engagement related to health, justice, and other socio-environmental concerns. The research focuses on capturing the effects of the intervention on Making Health A Shared Value Drivers: mindset and expectations, sense of community, and civic engagement. Findings from HAVOYCE will have local, state, and national implications for how to the arts can bridge with other sectors to improve health in underserved communities – especially for youth.

School-level randomized trial involving six public high schools in San Francisco Unified School District. Three schools are randomized to be HAVOYCE Schools and three to be active control schools. The control schools receive usual Youth Speaks programming associated with its established year-long artist-in-residence initiative. Compared to control schools that instigate art on a range of issues that emerge from the students’ lived experiences, HAVOYCE Schools attempt to influence the culture of a school as a whole, convey health-promoting information to youth, and elicit spoken word pieces on specific topics from youth