Adolescent Family Life
The Adolescent Family Life (AFL) Demonstration and Research program, created in 1981 as Title XX of the Public Health Service Act, supports both demonstration and research grants. Within OPA, the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs (OAPP) is responsible for administering the program. The AFL program is funded at $29.8 million in fiscal year 2008.
The AFL program supports demonstration projects to develop, implement and evaluate program interventions to promote abstinence from sexual activity among adolescents and to provide comprehensive health care, education and social services to pregnant and parenting adolescents. The program supports two basic types of demonstration projects: (1) prevention demonstration projects to develop, test, and use curricula that provide education and activities designed to encourage adolescents to postpone sexual activity until marriage, and (2) care demonstration projects to develop interventions with pregnant and parenting teens, their infants, male partners, and family members in an effort to ameliorate the effects of too-early-childbearing for teen parents, their babies and their families. The AFL program also funds grants to support research on the causes and consequences of adolescent premarital sexual relations, adolescent pregnancy and parenting.
The Title XX funds not only help the teens and families they serve directly, but also provide valuable information and evaluation findings that can serve as a basis for future strategies. Every program that receives AFL grant funds is required to include an independent evaluation component. This ensures that the lessons learned by each community will benefit others in the future.
In addition, to ensure that all AFL project staff at the local level have the necessary skills and training to implement these programs, the AFL program has conducted numerous technical assistance workshops annually since 1998 to train front line care and prevention project staff to provide more comprehensive services to their clients.
In 2008-2009, the AFL program is supporting 66 demonstration projects across the country. These projects consist of 35 prevention programs and 31 care programs.
