TICKET-NFSC & SPARK:..............................................................................

The TICKET to Success (Teens Interested in Caring for Kids who have Experienced Trauma) Program is a special, health-based program within SPARK that is designed to reach youth with HIV/AIDS who are trying to complete high school, learn job skills, and prepare for the future. TICKET exemplifies BMC’s mission and grows out of SPARK’s mission to help young people with HIV/AIDS reach for the future. As drug therapies continue to improve, children who were born with the virus are surviving longer into adulthood. At the same time, in impoverished communities of color, teens are still contracting the virus and being identified. There is an urgent and growing need to help these vulnerable adolescents. Their futures depend on their capacity to develop educational goals, self-sufficiency, responsibility, and adult job skills.

Many teens have lost their parents, so grandparents and extended family members have alternatively filled the void. However, the majority of families live at or below the poverty line and the considerable medical and daily expenses for these infected teens are a financial strain. These young people may find themselves suddenly without housing and financial support when they turn 18. Additionally, frequent doctor appointments, special learning needs, medication side effects and nutritional challenges make it hard for them to successfully compete with their peers for typical teenage job opportunities. Often, the job training/mentoring experience offered at the SPARK Center are the only exposure that these young adults have to such opportunities because of the constraints of their disease, family illness and poverty.

TICKET To Success offers young people with HIV/AIDS who are living in poverty and who have lost parents and/or lack positive adult role models, a daily opportunity to learn from adult mentors while also serving as mentors to younger children. Drawn from BMC and SPARK’s annual caseload of ~140 infected and affected children,participants are given supervised opportunities to work at SPARK with younger, special needs children, while earning a modest stipend. In order to participate, they are required to:

1. work consistently towards their high school diploma;
2. attend counseling for HIV medication adherence;
3. keep all their medical and mental health appointments; and
4. engage in peer support activities that teach life skills, job application guidance, résumé writing, mock job interviews, and financial literacy coaching.

The provision of modest and incremental stipends and the involvement of an ethnically-diverse and multi-disciplinary pool of mentors at SPARK and within the local community create a safe and encouraging learning environment that is appealing to young people with HIV/AIDS, who so often feel marginalized and stigmatized. TICKET draws young people in, and helps them to form a positive group identity that embraces HIV/AIDS as a defining, and even celebrated, part of the self; participants feel connected to each other as a family. The program helps youth take responsibility for their own long-term health and financial support, and inspires them to stay engaged and motivated to reach for higher aspirations which will lead them out of poverty. Two recent examples are illustrative: A young woman with recently-acquired HIV is learning to take her medicine, build self-acceptance, and complete her GED; she is also assisting early child childhood educators in the daily care of toddlers who have motor and feeding impairments as part of the TICKET program. Another young adult who was born with the virus and has extensive emotional and learning needs, is planning to attend a local community college after gaining confidence in her abilities to function as a bus driver assistant at SPARK.

SPARK’s TICKET to Success Program draws strength from a variety of local collaborations and affiliations. TICKET was developed in conjunction with the Peer Support Program at Justice Resource Institute (JRI) in Boston (www.jri.org). JRI contributed joint start-up stipend funding and part-time staff to the initiative. Additionally, partial salary support comes from the Griffin Foundation, Inc. from a one-time federal award, and from several small individual donor gifts.

Translating Best Practices: TICKET to Success

1. With Griffin Foundation support, we’ve launched TICKET to Success, SPARK’s job training and peer support program, at NFSC in Uganda. Rosette Serwanga traveled to Uganda for a month in Fall 2008 to engage in extensive strategic planning and coordination with the Ugandan and USA NFSC Boards in order to launch TICKET to Success for young people at NFSC. Dr. Vibbert participated in a number of meetings and a one-day retreat with the NFSC USA Board in Massachusetts to confirm SPARK’s role in child-oriented partnership activities, and promote knowledge exchange partnerships going forward.
2. TICKET is enabling 7 young people to take leadership roles in serving as program assistants and role models for children at NFSC. TICKET offers a sustainable model for improving service capacity within programs like SPARK and NFSC by drawing on the experience of young people (many of whom are orphaned) who have grown up in the programs, while helping them to find an avenue for skill-building, daily affirmation, and meaningful ways to join the adult work force while continuing their own counseling and medication adherence. (Reports and pictures are attached separately, documenting the exciting progress of TICKET Uganda.)
3. Laura Mitchell at SPARK spearheaded a “TICKET to Success Knowledge Transfer Project” that involved extensive interviewing of TICKET staff and participants at SPARK and documentation of their feedback. She videotaped these interviews so that all of the material can be shared with our partner TICKET Program at NFSC. We hope that joint review will allow us to make appropriate cultural and linguistic adjustments to the material so that it will be optimally relevant to TICKET providers in Namugongo.