Help celebrate 10 years of the Healthy Youth Act by protecting sex ed
Communities often have a hard time talking about sex. And yet, sexual health is a critical part of a young person's overall health. For young people, accessing the basic information, healthcare, and support they need can be really hard. When adults fail to build those systems, teens don't get what they need to thrive. And, they're more likely to experience unplanned pregnancies; high gonorrhea, chlamydia, and HIV rates; and challenges with relationships, development, or their sexuality.
The good news is that there are smart, proven best practices to support young people's sexual health in age-appropriate ways, and our results are very real. In our 2018 fiscal year, we provided training and technical assistance to more than 1,300 adults who work with young people. Those adults, in turn, created a better environment for literally hundreds of thousands of young people. For example:
- When we trained 204 clinic staff on teen-friendly practices, they provided 7,641 young people with better services.
- When we taught 519 school personnel to be allies to LGBTQ+ youth, they created safer schools for 287,534 students.
- When we coached 48 foster care and juvenile detention professionals on how to provide trauma-informed information, they supported 343 of our most vulnerable young people.
How We Put Your Gift to Work
SHIFT NC works with communities to help young people grow up healthy. We do this by focusing on key strategic priorities:
- Promoting high quality, effective sex education;
- Helping healthcare providers become teen-friendly and promoting healthcare access;
- Creating safe, supportive, and affirming spaces for LGBTQ youth;
- Thoughtfully addressing the needs of our most vulnerable youth by helping professionals address trauma; and
- Helping parents and communities have more productive conversations about sexual health.
This approach works! Since our founding, the state's teen pregnancy rates have dropped 75%! When we expanded our mission to cover all of adolescent sexual health, we did it knowing that we could make a big impact on issues like STDs and relationships. But we need you...
Increasingly, our services are under threat - whether it's a federal shift toward "abstinence-only-until-marriage" education or the small, emboldened minority that opposes sex education, access to contraception, and the very existence of LGBTQ youth.
When you give to SHIFT NC, you are supporting North Carolina young people by helping the adults in their lives address a critical part of overall health: their sexual health. Thanks for being a part of an amazing movement to help young people grow up healthy.