This seed project supported the development of an innovative knowledge dissemination strategy for research on HIV/AIDS and Aboriginal youth.

The project aimed to:

• involve Aboriginal youth in a performed ethnography project designed to turn data collected in a study on HIV/AIDS and Aboriginal youth into scripts and discussion questions that can be used for HIV/AIDS education in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities;
• develop a draft evaluation tool to assess the effectiveness of the scripts as a knowledge dissemination strategy; and
• pilot the performed ethnography and evaluation tool with a group of Aboriginal youth and non-Aboriginal youth from local community organizations.

Together, we produced The Youth Warriors: Combating HIV/AIDS Through the Arts (2011) manual and DVD. Selected images below are taken from the manual.

This project extended the collaborative work of the Gendering Adolescent AIDS Prevention (GAAP) Project, University of Toronto and the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network (CAAN) to include Native Child and Family Services. The tools developed through this grant  were used as the basis of a larger proposal to support the wider dissemination of the innovative prevention strategy and to assess its effectiveness with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences in Ontario and Quebec sites associated with our GAAP project on Aboriginal youth.