Innovation in OPA Grant Programs

TPP Innovation Grants Show Positive Evaluation Results

OPA’s TPP program is a national, evidence-based program that funds diverse organizations working to prevent teen pregnancy across the United States. OPA funds the exploration, development, testing, and rigorous evaluation of new and innovative interventions to significantly reduce teen pregnancy disparities and advance the field of adolescent sexual health. Investing in teen pregnancy prevention programs helps adolescents reach their full potential.

Overview

“Innovation is the ability to generate and execute new ideas—incremental, evolutionary, or revolutionary—and it starts with creativity. Creativity is the ability to look past the obvious—to transcend traditional ways of seeing the world to create something new.” - from IDEO

Innovation in the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) refers to a community-driven and disciplined process of finding solutions to some of our most complex public health challenges. It also reflects a broad spectrum of new or adapted products, programming, strategies, approaches, interventions, policies, and practices that propel our mission of advancing health across the reproductive lifespan. OPA embeds innovation values and methods in all we do, but we especially promote it in and across our Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) and Title X family planning grant programs. OPA convenes, builds community, and makes connections across our diverse innovators.

Innovation Funding: OPA funds grants, cooperative agreements, and prize challenges that support community-based innovations to improve health outcomes.
Innovation Community: Learn more about emergent innovations from our growing community of sexual and adolescent health innovators.
Learning and Dissemination: OPA shares learnings with the field through journal articles, videos, conferences, and more.

Innovation Funding

OPA funds six adolescent sexual health Innovation Hubs to foster innovation, conduct research, and expand the evidence to support and advance equity in the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program. Our Innovation Hub “Incubators” are recruiting teams to explore needs in the field and build new innovations. Our Innovation Hub “accelerators” help teams with existing innovations further test and refine them. All Innovation Hubs are seeking applicants for their Innovation Development Teams (IDTs), with whom they will support and collaborate on adolescent sexual health innovation projects. Get more information about each Innovation Hub and assess which one might be the right fit for your adolescent health team.

HHS OASH Office of Population Affairs Adolescent Sexual Health Innovation Hubs: In/Tend, ETR, Youthink, Breakthrough Accelerator, Launch Innovation, and Policy and Research

OPA funds additional grants, cooperative agreements, and prize challenges that support community-based innovations to improve health outcomes. Learn about all active OPA innovators below:

Innovation Community

In May 2023, OPA convened 50 innovation teams from the TPP Program, Title X, and our research and evaluation grants to build relationships, workshop their innovations, and fine tune their design skills. Four showcase videos resulted from that event. Watch our compilation video to learn more about how OPA integrates innovation into our grant programs. Watch the other three video shorts to learn more specifically about innovations for engaging and supporting families, advancing adolescent health equity, and improving health care access and service delivery.

Innovation in OPA Grant Programs: Overview

Still of an animation showing a young person speaking with a health care provider in a clinic.

Fostering Parenthood Podcast theme art displays a cartoon figure with a lightbulb speech bubble and another cartoon figure with a heart speech bubble.

Video still of two youth and one adult walking and smiling during a conversation in a field.

Learning and Dissemination

Still of Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP) Continuum Create, identify, and scale effective approaches in communities across the country.

Still of Title X Innovation Lab where 14 innovators from Title X and TPP showcased their unique products, strategies, and tools for nearly 200 Title X grantee conference participants.

Photo of TPP program staff and participants happily holding a banner that reads: Welcome 2 LiFT.

Prevention Science Supplemental Issue: Evidence from the TPP Program's Experiment with Innovation

OPA is excited to share the Special Issue on Evidence from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program Experiment with Innovation, our first-ever journal supplement focused on innovation in the TPP program. Our special supplement encompasses 15 articles from innovation grant recipients over the years, highlighting critical findings related to innovation impacts, implementation science, network development, evaluation-readiness, intervention development, and more. It also includes an introduction from OPA that explores how the TPP program adapted and refined its approach for fostering dynamic innovation-to-scale projects, as well as a special commentary from the Partnership for Public Service.

Explore all the open access articles below: