Peer Health Exchange

Peer Health Exchange gives teenagers the knowledge and skills they need to make healthy decisions. It does this by training college students to teach a comprehensive health curriculum in public high schools that lack health education. The majority of these students live at or below the poverty line and experience a disproportionate number of serious health risks ranging from teenage pregnancy to obesity.

PHE recruits, selects, and trains college student volunteers to teach a comprehensive health curriculum consisting of thirteen standardized health workshops on topics ranging from decision-making and sexual health to substance abuse and nutrition.

In the classroom, PHE high school students articulate their values and goals, learn basic, accurate health information, explore attitudes and perceptions of peer norms and peer pressure, analyze the influence of culture and the media on health, discuss barriers to health behaviors and strategies to overcome them, and identify and learn how to use the health resources in their communities.

PHE's evaluation work to date indicates that the program is effective in demonstrable ways:

• Nearly 94% of participating students said they will use something they learned from the PHE workshops to make a healthy decision in the future, and 61% of students said they had already used something they had learned from the workshops to make a healthy decision during the six months the program ran.
• The participants made statisically significant increases in their health knowledge, with a 42% growth from Pre-Test to Post-Test.
• 93% of participating high school principals said they would recommend the program to other schools.
• 93% of PHE volunteers said they would recommend the program to other college students.

LA-area college partners include USC, UCLA, Occidental and Cal State Northridge.