Introduction: Adolescent women living with HIV or who are at high risk for HIV have a unique set of personal and service needs which often slip through the cracks in traditional service delivery systems. To address the needs of young people with HIV, the Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS) Program of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) funded a set of ten adolescent-focused programs specifically to provide innovative HIV services to this population. Each of the ten projects used community and/or agency outreach to bring young people into services.

Project Description: A cross-cutting evaluation of ten adolescent-focused HIV service demonstration projects was implemented over a three year period. A common method of collecting data among the ten projects was developed in collaboration between the grantees, the evaluators, and HRSA/HAB's SPNS. Key to all ten projects is the implementation of outreach models to bring young women and men into care.

Results: A total of 2,197 young women 11 - 27 years of age received direct outreach services from the ten projects. In addition, more than 17,000 females were estimated to be affected by the agencies' outreach presentations across the ten sites.

Implications: Innovative outreach strategies are needed to connect young women with HIV or at high risk for HIV with needed medical and social services. Most of the ten adolescent SPNS Program projects used a combination of agency and individual outreach methods. Many of the programs specifically identified nontraditional approaches of outreach as being most effective in working with young women. This paper reviews a number of issues suggested by the findings of the ten adolescent SPNS Program projects, and how they may generalize to other programs for young women living with or at high risk for HIV.