Issue: City, County and State level public health municipalities are under-staffed and under-resourced. More recently, projections have shown in the next decade there will be a reduction of the public health workforce. African Americans and other Minority groups continue to be underrepresented in public health, medicine, and research, while being the most disproportionately impacted across health indicators.

Description: The Flint Public Health Youth Academy (FPHYA) has developed an effective curriculum and menu of programming designed to introduce, engage, and educate youth while creating a pathway to careers in public health. To date, FPHYA has conducted, 4 annual youth summer camps, 9 youth-partnered projects, 3 photo voice projects, 7 youth dialogues, 3 scientific presentations, and 4 health messaging campaigns and conducted/facilitated over 60 youth talk shows. To date FPHYA has engaged over 3,000 youth in our programming, exposing youth, especially youth of color to the field of public health while providing internships, mentors, and community assessment activities. The FPHYA program provides a best practice model for public health workforce engagement.

Lessons Learned: In this presentation, we will share the following lessons which have proven to be useful in our work: 1) the development of effective youth-centered public health programming, 2) utilization of youth peer-to peer educational models and 3) using a multi-layered approach to introducing public health including interactive activities.

Recommendation: Provide engagement opportunities for youth to experience public health and understanding its relationship to outcomes that directly impact them, is critical to building the public health workforce and decreasing the disparity of underrepresentation of minority public health professionals.