The 2026 Title V Competitive Sexual Risk Avoidance Education grant application has been announced! We hope this toolkit will help you win one of the 2026 Competitive Title V grants.
Application deadline is August 17, 2026
The Dibble Institute is dedicated to your success as an applicant!
Organizations in the following states and territories are eligible to apply in 2026.
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Two “Abstinence Only” versions of Love Notes are aligned with the 2026 Title V grant NOFO criteria of encouraging youth to avoid non-marital sexual activity as optimal healthy behavior. They also both teach skills to help youth avoid risks without normalizing sexual activity outside of marriage.
- Love Notes 4.1 includes family planning methods for use in a marriage and framed within a broader sexual risk avoidance approach.
- Love Notes 4.2 contains no family planning or contraception content.
Both are eligible for inclusion in this grant. Please select the version you feel will work best with your youth and in your community.
In a randomized control trial, youth in Love Notes were:
- More likely to remain abstinent,
- More likely to return to abstinence, AND
- 46% less likely to become pregnant or experience a teenage pregnancy.
Love Notes AO was developed for young people ages 14 to 19.*
*The Love Notes Middle School Adaptation is appropriate for middle school youth ages 10-13.
Both Love Notes AO are medically accurate, age-appropriate, culturally and linguistically appropriate, and trauma-informed.
To address the NOFO’s trauma-informed and resilience-focused approaches, you may wish to consider including Mind Matters 2.0 – A Map for Thriving in your proposal as a supplemental program. It addresses the needs of young people who have experienced trauma. The program can also be used to train your staff to support these youth.
Below, please find tools and grant aids for both Abstinence-Only adaptations of Love Notes, which we hope you will find helpful. Let us know if there is any other information that you would find useful.
Email Kim@DibbleInstitute.org for a free 30-day review copy of Love Notes AO 4.1 or 4.2. Please let us know that you are interested in Competitive Title V funding.
- Evidence-Based Intervention
- Curriculum Requirements
- Bonus Points - ACF Alignment
- Medical Accuracy Review
- A-F Crosswalk
- Logic Model
- Positive Youth Development
- Success Sequence for Poverty Prevention
- Human Trafficking Universal Education
- Trauma-informed Care
- Fidelity Tools
- Populations - Settings
- Training Expectations
- Technical Assistance
- Sustainability
- Teaching Supply List
- Materials and Training Budget
- Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
The citations provided below give a rationale for choosing Love Notes AO as your intervention. They cite evidence that demonstrates how Love Notes applies its key program elements to positively influence youth behavior change, namely delaying initiation of sexual activity, preventing and reducing teen pregnancies and sexual activity.
- Barbee, A. P., Cunningham, M. R., Antle, B. F., Langley, C. N. (2022). Impact of a relationship-based intervention, Love Notes, on teen pregnancy prevention. Family Relations, 1-20.
- Impact of Two Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Interventions on Risky Sexual Behavior: A Three-Arm Cluster Randomized Control Trial(pdf). Anita P. Barbee, MSSW, PhD, Michael R. Cunningham, PhD, Michiel A. van Zyl, PhD, Becky F. Antle, MSSW, PhD, and Cheri N. Langley,PhD, MPH, 2016.
- Cunningham, M. R., van Zyl, M. A., & Borders, K. W. (2016). Evaluation of Love Notes and Reducing the Risk in Louisville, Kentucky. Final Evaluation Report to the University of Louisville Research Foundation, Louisville, KY
If you’d like to provide further trauma informed care for your youth, consider adding Mind Matters 2.0 for additional tools and resources. More research on the program can be found here:
- Antle, B.F., et al. (2021). Mind Matters Comprehensive Evaluation Final Report. Findings from a randomized control trial conducted at the University of Louisville. Read the Full Report here.
Download the Curriculum Requirements PDF!
Alignment with ACF vision, mission, values, priorities, and guiding principles (Up to 10 Points)
ACF’s published Vision, Mission, Values, Priorities, and Guiding Principles inform programmatic and administrative expectations under this funding opportunity.
Applicants must demonstrate alignment by describing how the proposed project advances relevant ACF priorities through program design and evaluation. Applicants should clearly identify which ACF priorities are relevant and explain how those priorities are reflected in the proposed approach.
The chart below shows how Love Notes supports the ACF values. You will need to expand this with how your organization and grant activity support the values.
| Promoting Work & Self-Sufficiency – SRAE emphasizes personal responsibility, goal-setting, and future orientation. SRAE explicitly links behavior to poverty prevention and economic independence. | Love Notes 4.1 AO/4.2 AO: Relationship Skills for Love, Life, and Work teaches a powerful set of evidence-based skills to improve communication, negotiation, and the handling of conflict. These skills are adapted from PREP, the Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program. Youth practice new ways to handle anger and regulate strong emotions. They learn a technique for how to talk through difficult or sensitive issues. They learn how to more effectively raise issues and complaints, recognize hidden issues, and solve problems within their relationships.
The primary reason for involuntary job termination is the lack of self-regulation and communications skills. These communication skills are essential in increasing successful and cooperative interactions in the workplace, increasing job retention, and improving economic independence. |
| Promoting Marriage & Family Formation – SRAE has a strong focus on avoiding nonmarital sexual activity and promoting healthy relationships that lead to stable marriages and families, which directly aligns with ACF priorities. | Love Notes 4.1 AO/4.2 AO full instructional arc is marriage and family centered: relationship vision and aspirations (Lesson 1); self-awareness and healthier intergenerational patterns (Lesson 2); explicit expectations about commitment, faithfulness, marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and providing (Lesson 3); wise partner selection and shared values (Lessons 4-5); leaving unsafe relationships rather than treating marriage as a goal at any cost (Lessons 6-7); marriage before childbearing and the Success Sequence (Lesson 8); communication and conflict skills that sustain healthy marriages (Lessons 9-10); reserving sex for marriage and making a personal abstinence plan (Lessons 11-12); and the financial, social, emotional, and child-development benefits of healthy, committed marriage and stable family formation (Lesson 13). Marriage and family formation are continually reinforced as positive, aspirational life goals – not a passing reference – directly supporting 7 points for exclusive abstinence education and 3 points for documented marriage and family-formation alignment. |
| Gold-Standard Research – Research and evaluation conducted under SRAE must be rigorous. SRAE provides opportunities for independent local evaluation and conducts rigorous national evaluation which is fully aligned with ACF priorities. | Love Notes was evaluated in a 5-year $4.8 million study through the University of Louisville. It is is considered to be evidence based on statistically significant decreases in sexual activity, and avoidance of pregnancy (46% less likely) as well as an increase in the likelihood that teens would choose to remain abstinent and for those who were already sexually active an increase in the likelihood they would stop having sex.
The author and publisher would welcome and fully support additional gold-standard evaluations of Love Notes AO. |
| Ensuring Value Alignment in Funding– SRAE statute centers on sexual risk avoidance and personal responsibility, aligning with ACF priorities on family formation, self-sufficiency, and behavioral outcomes. | The following lessons illustrate alignment with the values of SRAE funding:
• L1 builds a relationship vision; connects relationship quality to school, work, health, and children; activates a Trusted Adult Connection. • L2 strengthens self-awareness, emotion/behavior insight, and conscious decisions about family-of-origin patterns to continue or change. • L3 examines expectations for partners, adulthood, and family life; practices maturity, character, and communicating expectations. • L4 teaches healthy relationship foundations, pacing, attraction chemistry, and the 3-6-9-month guide before major decisions. • L5 applies seven smart-relationship principles, seven questions, compatibility, and a realistic model of committed love. • L6 helps youth distinguish healthy from unhealthy relationships, assess current relationships, and end unsafe or unsuitable relationships responsibly. • L8 teaches deliberate decision-making for relationships, sex, cohabitation, marriage, pregnancy, and parenthood; links education/training, employment, marriage, and family stability through Pathways and Sequences Towards Success. • L11 frames intimacy, sexual ethics, and consent within marriage; youth clarify values, readiness, boundaries, and a personal line for waiting until marriage. • L12 reinforces medically accurate pregnancy/STI/HIV knowledge, alcohol/drug risk awareness, a personal avoidance plan, and assertiveness/refusal practice. • L13 uses children’s needs to motivate delayed childbearing until greater maturity, education/training, employment, and marriage; addresses fathers, co-parenting, stable families, and a personal success plan for education, career, relationships, and family. |
A contractor for the Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) recently reviewed and approved Love Notes for medical accuracy.
We would be pleased to work with you on a medical accuracy review post-award.
Marline Pearson, the author of Love Notes, is rightly called the “grandmother” of the Success Sequence. In the seminal work, Making a Love Connection, Marline and noted sociologist and scholar Barbara Dafoe Whathead, introduced the concept of sequencing life’s major events, especially marriage and pregnancy, as key to a successful life trajectory. Marline has since consulted with Brad Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies on a video series for young people that explores and promotes the Success Sequence.
She, of course, wrote the Success Sequence into Love Notes to directly reach more youth with its message.
The Success Sequence, another important concept of Love Notes AO, is introduced after seven lessons designed to provide youth with the skills and knowledge to set future goals and build healthy relationships.
In the lesson, Decide, Don’t Slide! Pathways and Sequences Towards Success, the program highlights how a combination of certain milestones or achievements – specifically, completing high school, obtaining full-time employment, and waiting until marriage to have children– can really matter for successful economic outcomes and family stability.
The program emphasizes the benefits of planning and clear decision-making throughout one’s youth, especially as it pertains to sexual activity and successful financial, physical, and emotional outcomes in adulthood.
This concept is then revisited throughout the remainder of the program, with the closing activity designed to have youth create a concrete plan for achieving the key milestones of the Success Sequence.
To download the table below, click here!
Love Notes AO covers sex trafficking in a section of Lesson 7 “Dangerous Love” where information on sex trafficking is provided. Specifically, the section includes discussions around risks for trafficking, how to identify potential trafficking schemes, and skills to build one’s safety, seek help and support, and provides examples of national resources available to youth.
In order to cover other areas of human trafficking, we suggest you explore and consider including information from the resources provided in the NOFO.
Love Notes was designed with two trauma-informed goals in mind:
To directly empower youth: Help teens and young adults who have experienced childhood adversity to make meaning of their pasts by looking at the patterns they experienced to better understand how these earlier events have influenced their lives and choices. Most importantly, to support youth in defining what they want in their relationships, their present or future family, and for their life goals. Yet defining isn’t enough. It is essential to equip young people with the knowledge and skills to build self-efficacy and confidence to move towards their goals.
To prevent Adverse Childhood Experiences in the children these youth have or may have in the future: An important hook throughout the curriculum is how Intimate Partner Violence, unstable and turbulent relationships, and unplanned pregnancies affect children. These concepts are conveyed through upbeat and empowering activities. Vulnerable youth immediately understand the connection between family structure and outcomes for children and they long to protect to their current or eventual children. We build upon that protective, empathetic instinct. We tap their aspirations and give them a huge trove of knowledge and skills to help them move towards their aspirations.
If you want additional trauma-based tools to help the young people you serve, consider including Mind Matters 2.0. It gives teens and the adults who serve them a map for the journey toward healing—and the tools to follow it.
Built on the latest research in neuroscience and trauma-informed care, Mind Matters 2.0 teaches practical, hands-on skills for managing stress, building resilience, creating a support system and cultivating self-compassion. Version 2.0 incorporates new evidence-based tools and approaches that reflect what we have learned in recent years about trauma, hope, healing, and the brain.
Additionally, The Dibble Institute has developed Trauma Informed Teaching Tips to help assure the safety and well-being of the young people you serve.
The following fidelity aids and checklists are included when you purchase the Love Notes AO Manual:
- Annotated slide deck to focus the instructor on key content.
- Observational fidelity tools for coaches and evaluators.
- Love Notes knowledge test.
- Inventory of related scales that can assess attitudinal and behavioral outcomes regarding sex, relationship quality, communication, conflict, control, violence as well as mediators.
Note: To maintain fidelity, training of your organization’s Love Notes instructors by a Dibble Training Specialist is required.
Love Notes is being successfully implemented with many youth across a wide variety of settings. Below is a partial list of populations and settings where Love Notes is being used.
For more details about implementation settings and populations, review case studies here.
Settings
- System engaged youth
- Group homes (Foster)
- Residential settings (Mental health)
- Detention centers
- Challenge academies
- Schools, including classes for pregnant and parenting teens
- Alternative schools
- Faith-based settings
- Community agencies
Populations
- Youth living in areas with high rates of teen births and STIs
- Youth in, or aging out, of foster care system
- Youth who are victims of trafficking
- Risk-immersed youth
- Pregnant and parenting teens (both fathers and mothers)
- Youth in correctional settings
- Tribal youth
- Runaway and homeless youth
- Community college students
- Youth who have been abused
The Dibble Institute offers high-quality, ongoing training and professional development for all your project staff and facilitators, covering both the program’s approach and the factors that influence youth sexual risk avoidance, to support successful implementation and evaluation. We also provide ongoing follow-up technical assistance to facilitators as needed. To help ensure the success of your SRA implementation, we recommend the following training protocols:
1) For clients new to Love Notes
Five day 3.5-hour per day online training or 3 full day in-person training for all instructional and project staff. Group discounts are available.
Please call Carlie Kaeppler at 800-695-7975 ext. 703 or Carlie@Dibbbleinstitute.org to obtain a training quote.
2) Clients who have attended a Dibble-certified training in a previous edition of Love Notes (3.0 or earlier) or Relationship Smarts PLUS
One day virtual or in-person training to review new, updated, and/or content unique to Love Notes AO.
Please call Dr. Rachel Savasuk-Luxton at 800-695-7975 ext. 705 or email Rachel@Dibbleinstitute.org to obtain a training quote.
3) Clients who have attended a Dibble-certified training in Love Notes 4.0 Classic or SRA or 4.1 SD or CSE
Please call Dr. Rachel Savasuk-Luxton at 800-695-7975 ext. 705 or email Rachel@Dibbleinstitute.org to begin a needs assessment process and development of your personalized training plan.
**Please note: If you have trainees with varied experience attending a training, your training plan will be based on those individuals who have the least experience with Love Notes AO.
4) Clients with TOT-Certified Love Notes Trainers on staff
The Dibble Institute includes two hours of complimentary technical assistance (TA) with every Group Training Agreement. Additional TA at $95 an hour may be scheduled based on your needs.
We can help you craft a clear and realistic recruitment, retention, training, and TA plan to build capacity on topics pertinent to implementation of your SRA project and priorities listed in this NOFO for facilitators throughout the grant.
Based on your needs, TA topics could include:
- Developing a post-training plan for successful facilitation
- Handling sensitive topics
- Trauma-informed training techniques
- Improving facilitation skills
- Creating effective recruitment and retention plans
- Successful implementation models in schools and community organizations
- Identifying participant referral resources
The Dibble Institute is pleased to consult with you as you write your grant and after it has been awarded strategies to sustain your activities over time. We have demonstrated over our nine years of implementing a federal grant, how to bring relationship education cost-effectively to large numbers of youth by using existing community systems.
We can also help you develop your sustainability plans by identifying alternative funding streams that support relationship education beyond your grant. Our Dibble Team is ready to research opportunities on behalf of your organization, curating a personalized list of funding. Your Funding Opportunity Report will provide all the relevant information needed to choose new funding opportunities, build relationships with the funder, and begin the application process when funds are made available. For $99, you can purchase a funding opportunity report that includes:
- A relevant list of opportunities for your organization at Federal, State, and Local Levels
- Description of each grant or other funding type
- Relevant dates, deadlines, and information to apply
- A comprehensive list of Dibble resources to support your application
- A one-on-one meeting with Dibble staff to review the report and talk about next steps
Please email Kay Reed, Executive Director, at kayreed @ DibbleInstitute.org to set up a time to consult.
Art supplies for Love Notes AO could total up to $200 per 30 participants. Please budget accordingly.
Please complete this form as part of your planning and budgeting process. We will need to see it prior to signing an MOU with your organization.
The Dibble Institute is pleased to sign an MOU with you as part of your application.
To help us understand your plans, please send an email Aaron @ DibbleInstitute.org with the following information:
- Numbers of students you plan to serve each year of the grant.
- Your signed Materials and Training Agreement