What It Is

Activate creates timely, accessible, and evidence-based resources using a research-based process to translate research to practice and human-centered design to prioritize the needs and motivations of youth-supporting professionals.

Activate’s key audiences include professionals who work in systems with youth involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems (e.g., youth in foster care; youth on probation), youth experiencing homelessness, and opportunity youth (i.e., youth who are disconnected from school and work).

Why It Matters

Professionals often lack easily accessible, research-based adolescent sexual and reproductive health resources in their work.

These are resources for the real world.

We know that when youth-supporting professionals have research-backed approaches handy, they can focus on what matters—encouraging young people to make healthy choices about their sexual and reproductive health.

That’s why the Activate Collective creates and curates easy-to-use resources to help professionals put essential research into practice. These are resources for the real world.

Our Role in Activate

Brand and Website

Healthy Teen Network designed and launched the Activate brand and the original website. Our goal is to provide high-quality visuals and consistent designs targeted towards our end users, youth-supporting professionals, while also being user-friendly and accessible.

Brand recognition is essential, particularly for a new initiative like Activate, to generate recognition, trust, and motivation to use our resources. Healthy Teen Network intentionally designed the Activate brand, as demonstrated in our design of the website, to be different and stand out from the typical federally-funded center you might see.

Brand recognition is essential, particularly for a new initiative like Activate, to generate recognition, trust, and motivation to use our resources.

To create this modern, friendly, and accessible brand, we intentionally created a brand that incorporates digitally drawn sketches with clean lines, vibrant colors, clean geometries and lines, and use of white space, borrowing from (or building on) Modernism and Minimalism designs. We want our potential resource end-users to anticipate that we are accessible and user-friendly, and that is reflected in our branding.

Human-Centered Design

As an expert on human-centered design, Healthy Teen Network has provided guidance, coaching, and support to Activate project teams, as they considered how to create high-quality resources designed to meet the needs of the end-users.

Human-centered design (HCD) is a creative problem-solving process that involves the communities we serve in the development of solutions to the issues they face. In HCD, the end–users’ contributions become the backbone of our solutions. HCD also challenges us to see our work differently, especially for those of us who may think of our roles and professions as not as creative.  

Human-centered design centers the end-user, so you can create inovative solutions that meet their needs better.

Because, as the name suggests, HCD design provides opportunities to collaborate with end-users as active contributors of the solution. The combination of these real-world perspectives, along with research and best practices, means we can create innovative solutions that actually solve problems.

Dissemination

As a project partner, Healthy Teen Network supports the dissemination efforts to share Activate resources with youth-supporting professionals.

Sample Resource: 7 Tips

Get the 7 Tips and more resources at www.ActivateCollective.org.

What’s Next

Through Activate’s initial needs assessment, youth-supporting professionals said they need research-informed, useful, and accessible resources (e.g., tools, trainings, and other job aids) to support their work in sexual and reproductive health.

Over the next year, Activate will continue to develop new resources in line with its priorities for research-to-practice translation.

Our Experts