Healthy, Empowered And Responsible Teens of OKC Project (HEART of OKC)

HEART OF OKC provides a vital resource that transforms science into practice and practice into outcomes in ways that help young people grow up healthy, caring and capable.

In late 1995, Oklahoma City was one of 13 communities selected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to participate in an innovative community-driven teen pregnancy prevention initiative.  The OKC project - Healthy, Empowered And Responsible Teens of OKC (HEART of OKC) - was coordinated by the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy, the statewide non-profit child advocacy organization. From the outset, HEART of OKC focused on re-framing the dialogue to change the adult views of youth from negative, deficit-based perspectives to strength-based perspectives that focused on increasing a core set of protective factors - youth assets -  while also reducing specific health risk behaviors.  Promoting positive youth development from an asset-building approach served as the overarching prevention strategy for the project.

By design, HEART of OKC was both population-based and neighborhood-based, targeting high need, high poverty, racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the central city where the teen births were the highest.  At the same time, the project worked at the community level to create a "network of opportunities" to promote and support teen pregnancy prevention across community sectors.  The two-year planning phase focused on gathering information and conducting needs assets assessments, being responsive to and respectful of the various cultural, religious, economic, and social groups and issues in the inner city neighborhoods.