month for "the busy task of conducting focus groups," he says. They were gathering data, "running this idea by people, asking them what they thought, was this something that could be discussed, was this completely taboo, could it get off the ground." They met with soccer players, government officials, and with other HIV advocacy groups.

By the time they returned to the U.S., Grassroot Soccer had received its 501(c)(3) approval. They began holding fund-raisers—in Boston, New York City, and all over the country. The fund-raising meant a lot of traveling. "In residency, you don't have too many free weekends," Clark says. "I was traveling a lot of my free weekends all the way through residency, doing these things—Palo Alto and San Francisco and Phoenix and Albuquerque and Boston. The most successful one we had was in Hanover."

It didn't hurt that some of Clark's soccer-playing buddies were celebrities and willing to help with the fund-raising: Dartmouth College grad Andrew Shue, Class of 1989, the star of the popular television show Melrose Place, and Ethan Zohn, the winner of Survivor: Africa, a reality TV show. Grassroot Soccer also received a grant from the Gates Foundation to do a pilot study in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

A curriculum was developed, players were trained, and they went into classrooms.

First, Clark says, "the players stand in front of the kids and talk to them, explain who they are, why they're involved with this project." They talk about AIDS. "The first time these kids might have talked about [AIDS] is with people who are their heroes."

The rest of the program consists of four two-hour sessions doing specially developed games and role-playing. In a game called "My Supporter," for instance, a child stands in the middle of a circle.

"My idea very simply," say Clark, "was to somehow se the fame and cachet of these professional soccer players to impact the community around HIV, to get the subject in the open."

"It's a trust game where you lean to the side, you're blindfolded, people push you up," says Clark. "The thing you talk about before we play that game is all the people who support someone in the community. The kids think of all the people who help them out in their lives. Then we play the game and everyone gets a chance to go in the middle and respond. People laugh. Then we talk about, 'What happens in your community when someone is HIV-positive.' And they say, 'Well, maybe your friends don't come and see you any more.' So the friends take a few steps back. 'What happens to your teacher? Maybe your teacher doesn't ask you questions any more.' . . . So then you ask the kid, 'Now, how would you feel if you were being set aside and didn't have the people to support you?'"

All the games are physical and fun, "but they all come back to a point," says Clark. And at the end of the session, there's a graduation ceremony that families and friends attend; the students get t-shirts and certificates.

The curriculum is based on world-renowned behaviorist Albert Bandura's social learning theory. Bandura even sits on the Grassroot advisory board. Clark explains that according to Bandura, people don't change their behavior by themselves. Instead, behavior "exists within a community and you have to change the community as well. So [the graduation ceremony] is our opportunity to get the message out to the community—parents, other brothers and sisters."

Is Grassroot Soccer effective? It's too soon to know for sure, but Clark has been evaluating the pilot. The students are surveyed about what they know about

HIV and prevention before the sessions, immediately afterward, and again five months later. They seem to be able to remember where to go for HIV information, but after five months their knowledge of condom effectiveness has decreased. Clark thinks conflicting messages about condom use in that society causes confusion. The experimental design of the study has also been criticized, because the intervention messages spread to the control group, which is at the same school as the intervention group. Clark isn't too concerned, though. He's pleased that the HIV/AIDS prevention messages are spreading in unanticipated ways.

He wants to improve the curriculum and export it to other organizations. Grassroot Soccer has already conducted a train-the-trainer exercise for physical education teachers in Ethiopia. "That's how we'll get our program to a large number of kids with a minimal amount of intervention," says Clark. The organization is also designing an HIV/AIDS workbook in a soccer magazine format and forging partnerships with other organizations, including the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. And a spin-off group in the U.S., KickAIDS, is using college and medical students to educate young people about the worldwide AIDS crisis.

Clark, who has received several national awards for his work, including the Annie Dyson Award of the American Academy of Pediatrics, is currently a fellow at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California at San Francisco. He and fellow soccer players have returned to Dartmouth several times to help develop opportunities for undergraduate and DMS students to participate in Grassroot Soccer. And in November, he participated in a three-day symposium at DMS on HIV/AIDS, "Great Issues in Medicine and Global Health."

For all Clark's worldwide interests, getting back to his own grassroots is nice.