Peer Health Exchange Inc

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Peer Health Exchange trains college student volunteers to teach our skills-based health education curriculum in high schools across the greater Bay Area. Through this model, we empower over 2,000 high school students in the Bay Area with the knowledge, skills, and resources to make healthy decisions. Independent results show that PHE increases students’ health knowledge, skills, and help-seeking behavior.

Why It Matters

Preventable health issues contribute to the staggering reality that over one million high school students drop out of school each year. Over 30% of girls who dropped out of high school cite early pregnancy or parenthood as a key reason. Approximately 50% of student living with a mental illness drop out of high school. Young people need and deserve accurate information, empowering skills, and access to quality health resources so that these statistics cease to be a reality. Our vision is work alongside our partners to advance health equity and improve health outcomes for young people.

What We Do

SCHOOL PARTNERS: PHE works in low-income, urban high schools that share our belief that health is a critical part of a young person’s education. These schools partner with PHE to supplement or provide their health education program.

PEER MODEL: PHE recruits, selects, and trains college student volunteers to teach PHE’s curriculum in high school classrooms. As slightly older peers, PHE volunteers are well-positioned to lead honest conversations about teens’ choices and health.

HEALTH CURRICULUM: PHE volunteers teach a thirteen-workshop curriculum through which teenagers learn essential health information and develop critical skills including decision-making, communication, advocacy, and accessing health resources in their schools and communities.

Over the course of the curriculum, students:

• Reflect on their personal health and the health of their communities
• Learn basic, accurate information about sexual health, mental health and substance use
• Learn to communicate effectively with family members and peers
• Advocate for the improvement of personal, family, and community health
• Learn how to use the health resources in their neighborhoods and schools
• Practice using a thoughtful decision-making model

Our Impact

PHE recently invested in an external to learn what works and doesn’t work in our model. The study included 4,000 students, comparing students who received PHE to those who did not.

We found that our program has a statistically-significant effect on sexual and mental knowledge, skills, and help-seeking behavior. For example:

• PHE students who toured their school-based health center as part of the PHE program were nearly twice as likely to use a health center in the future.
• Students were more likely to know how to access contraceptives, and significantly more PHE students intended to use condoms in the future than those in the control group.
• 65% of PHE students were able to accurately define what constitutes consent in a sexual situation, compared to 54% in the control group.