Tiffany Thompson, Manager, Pregnancy Prevention, ImatterPhilly

>> My name is Tiffany Thompson, and I am the program manager for I Matter Philly, a teen pregnancy prevention initiative out of Family Planning Council. So I'm a program manager for I Matter Philly, a teen pregnancy prevention initiative. And we're one of nine organizations to receive funding from the CDC and the Office of Adolescent Health in addition to President Obama. It's his one of nine winnable battles. And we're geared to decrease teen pregnancy by ten percent in west and southwest Philadelphia because west and southwest Philadelphia's teen pregnancy rates are almost double the national rate. So I particularly work on the community mobilization piece. So I work with key stakeholders in our city. I work with young people. We have a youth advisory board, so I run the young people they're ranging from 14 to 19, and they kind of do a lot of events and community engagement within their city and help young people really get more involved with teen pregnancy prevention. And then I run our two other boards which is comprised of key stakeholders of our core partners group which is our board of directors and then our community action team which is our on the ground grass root kind of leaders. And then also in terms of what the entire project does is, one, we work with clinical partners to make sure that they're more teen friendly and that they're giving teens access to clinical care and making sure that they have access to all types of contraception. And then we also do EBIs which is evidence based interventions. So we work with schools, churches, community based organizations to train and help them facilitate evidence based curriculum. And these evidence based curriculums they have been proven to reduce teens' initiation of sex. What tends to happen is young men get lost in this conversation. So we're actually this year working on a young men's project particularly on teen pregnancy prevention to figure out why young men don't really see that teen pregnancy prevention is their issue. And, two, how we can get them to also access clinical care, what makes them really want to do that. So we're happy that we have a lot of young people in our youth advisory board, especially young men. So we've been really good with that piece so.