Posted on July 11, 2014

NIH Spends $358K to Reduce Health Disparities Among LGBTQ Youth of Color

Melanie Hunter, CNS News, July 1, 2014

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $357,783 to the Fenway Community Health Center in Boston, Mass., to reduce health disparities in LGBTQ youth of color.

The purpose of the grant is described as “to establish a sustainable community-based participatory research process to reduce health disparities among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth of color.”

According to the grant, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) youth of color abuse alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, engage in risky sexual behaviors, and attempt suicide “in high rates that are disproportionate to those of both white LGBTQ youth and heterosexual youth of color.”

“Such evidence underscores the pressing need for interventions to improve the health of LGBTQ youth of color, many of whom face ‘tricultural’ experiences of stigma: homophobia from their racial/ethnic groups, racism from the majority white LGBT community, and the intersection of homophobia and racism from the culture at large,” the grant said.

The grant proposes that four Boston-based organizations with a long history of collaboration join forces to create a Project Team to “conduct a community needs assessment to identify a priority health condition” in the first year. In the second and third year, the groups will come up with a pilot intervention research study to address that condition.

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