[ Music ]
>> My name is Gary Harper.
I'm a professor of health behavior
and health education here in the School of Public Health.
I've been working in various different communities
with young gay and bisexual men throughout the city
of Chicago for many years.
The project that I've been working
on in Chicago is grant funded through the National Institute
of Mental Health where we've been developing an HIV
prevention/intervention for black gay
and bisexual young men ages 16 to 21.
>> The way we structured it has four individual session,
or four sessions where we meet as a group, six to eight guys
in a group and then two facilitators -
>> I feel like this is finally something
that addresses everything that young people need.
So it is a bit HIV focused, but, you know, it, you know,
has life experiences in there.
It actually has our success stories in there -
>> There's just this spark that happens behind someone's eyes
where you can tell they've learned a new bit of information
that has in some way changed their processing -
>> We have a youth action board.
So the youth action board are the young men that have been
with us since the very beginning of the project,
and they're all young black gay and bisexual men.
So they helped us to develop the intervention,
and then when we got to the point of implementing it,
the five guys that I mentioned were all able to serve
as facilitators in the project -
>> I started going to the youth action board meetings
and learning more about the project and slowly getting more
and more involved with the research process -
>> I've been at my job for going on three years.
I've been with this project going
on four years, and I just love it -
>> Because I really wanted guys who cared about the community,
who had a passion, who wanted to make a difference,
and that's really what we looked for, and it worked -
>> Those meetings were magic.
Like, and Omar would tell you, you know,
we came together, we would just chat.
You know, half the time we could kind of horse around,
but when it came time for business,
we got down to business -
>> Dr. Harper has a great personality.
It kind of just ropes you right in, and the fact
that he was willing to listen, you know, to me or to, you know,
the other youth action board members really showed us
that he was serious about the work and that he wanted
to make a difference -
>> You know, whatever it you're trying to accomplish,
if it's a certain race or type of people, you know,
that you're not a part of, it doesn't mean
that you can't do the work, but just do your research and,
you know, make sure you've done your facts -
>> When we think about working with communities, you know,
we have to take the pulse of the community.
We can't sort of say, you know, I know all this.
I have this many years of experience.
You know, that's great, but, you know,
they also have experience, and they live that -
>> When we submitted the grant to talk
about critical consciousness,
people weren't really clear what this was
because it isn't a concept that's been used a lot or much
at all in HIV prevention -
>> With critical consciousness, I think with awakening
that it kind of gives them a space to think for themselves
or maybe look at things in a different way -
>> For me, it was really a dream study because I had been working
with young black gay men in the community in Chicago
for so many years, and I kept hearing the same stories over
and over again about all of the different issues that they had
to deal with and juggle -
>> Being an adolescent or a young adult,
I really didn't have those safe spaces
or even an avenue where you could talk about being gay.
I don't even think that there was a word for it,
or it wasn't publically discussed.
So to have a space where people can talk
about their gay identities I think is wonderful -
>> We're nearing the end of data collection.
So at that point we'll be able to, you know,
start to look at the data.
And now we're going to be following them up to six months
after the intervention.
So we won't really know about long-term effects
until six months after, but anecdotally, yeah,
we've seen already that a lot of the young men from just being
in the group together have made connections -
>> There's so many young people like me who were
in the same position, and I'm the one that's, like, hey,
you should know about this.
I'm going to tell you if no one else has,
and it feels really good.
It honestly does -
>> I think a lot of times, especially in public health work
and especially as we move to a more biomedical focus,
I think we lose a lot of the human component,
and I just think that this is a rich opportunity
to actually hear from people -
>> That's the exciting thing for me
about doing real community based participatory research is
that it's not just about the study,
but it's about the long-lasting effects and the changes
that we're going to see for years to come in the community.