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Since its creation in 1986, The Hartford Action Plan has been a recognized leader in addressing issues of infant mortality and teen pregnancy in the Hartford community. HAP is a community partnership of residents, government, civic leaders, public and private health providers, corporations and schools. Between 1986 and 1995, HAP developed and implemented youth development programs directed at reducing teen pregnancy. The Always on Saturday program was designed specifically to involve boys in taking responsibility for their actions and to reduce teen births. By 1994, Hartford still had a very high percentage of births to teens, among the top three cities in the nation at 28%.
Hartford Action Plan realized that the goal of reducing the teen birth rate across the community could not be achieved by programs that served a limited number of youth each year. In 1995, HAP initiated the Breaking the Cycle campaign, a strategic partnership with the City of Hartford and the Hartford Public School System to prevent teen pregnancy. The plan was to implement community-wide programming that used teen pregnancy prevention strategies based on national evidence-informed and evidence-based programs. From 1996 to 2008, Breaking the Cycle programming included: Always on Saturday, our established youth program that now included programs for both boys and girls; Let’s Talk parent training initiatives; an Adult Advisors Academy training for youth workers; the school-based Postponing Sexual Involvement program; interventions to prevent second and subsequent births to teens; initiatives to expand public awareness of teen pregnancy issues; initiatives to expand access to age and culturally appropriate quality preventive reproductive health services for Hartford teens; initiatives (technical assistance and advocacy) to increase the delivery of age appropriate teen pregnancy prevention curricula in Hartford schools; and advocacy for expansion of Hartford youth services to reach more youth and technical assistance to assure that all of those services include teen pregnancy prevention components. In addition, HAP designed and implemented specific strategies to reach Latino youth. The leadership of Breaking the Cycle included a team representing the three major partners: the city of Hartford, represented by the Director of Health and Human Services; the school system, represented by a Deputy School Superintendent; and the President of the Hartford Action Plan Board of Directors. Frequent leadership meetings helped assure that programs were implemented as designed, and ongoing attention was paid to the overall goals of the effort: reducing the number and rate of teen births in Hartford.
The results of this effort have been continuing reductions in births to teens in Hartford, particularly in girls ages 17 and younger. The Hartford teen birth rate for 15 to 19 year olds has decreased from a high of 107.5/1000 in 1998 to a low of 63.8/1000 in 2007.