This fact sheet has been updated to reflect findings from our evaluation of El Camino from 2020 to 2023. It originally featured findings from a pilot evaluation from 2015 to 2018.
El Camino is a research-based goal-setting sexual health promotion program developed by Child Trends based on the principles of Positive Youth Development. El Camino promotes adolescent sexual health by encouraging youth to set goals, make informed sexual and reproductive health choices that align with those goals, and learn to communicate their sexual health limits. The program helps teens develop their own camino, or road, to pursue goals they identify for themselves.
This fact sheet describes the El Camino curriculum and pre- and post-test results from an evaluation of the program at 11 high schools in Montgomery County, MD from 2020 to 2023. El Camino serves high school-aged, English- or Spanish-speaking Latino adolescents who are male, female, or nonbinary—as well as other adolescents from historically excluded neighborhoods in the United States—and has been implemented with a wide range of students ages 13 to 20.