CENTERING SEX EDUCATION

Through Ford Foundation Funds, the Jane Fonda Center is exploring the need to alter current sex education frameworks to intersect more dynamically and meaningfully with the future.

Part of this process is expected to be a re-centering of sex education on the core needs of young people—those that are essential to healthy sexual living now and in the future. In part, this “Centering” sex education means providing youth with information basic to beginning their individual life-long journeys of personal sexual understanding and expression. It also means empowering youth to take on roles that help themselves and their peers travel safe and healthy pathways to sexual adulthood and ones that are unique and personal to their own selves.

To accomplish this futuristic examination, it will be necessary to explore changes in the world today and how that creates new options in the present and new problems or possibilities in the future.

Action Steps:

1. The Jane Fonda Center will dialogue with small groups of teens in the west, midwest, and eastern U.S that are in leadership roles affecting sex education delivery and outcomes as part of an adult-youth partnership.

2. The Jane Fonda Center will arrange regional meetings in which diverse groups of professionals from various parts of the country can participate in an exploration of youth sex education issues in today’s world and point directions for the future.

3. The Jane Fonda Center will prepare a manuscript of concerns identified, lessons learned, and proposed means for intersecting meaningfully with the future.

4. The Jane Fonda Center will host a retreat for 60 youth leaders from around the United States.

5. The Jane Fonda Center will hold an invitation-only symposium to explore and expand the concepts and content developed through the formative process.

6. The outcomes of this project, including data, core synthesis, meeting findings, and the symposium, will be summarized in a monograph and distributed to all participating parties, academic partners, and policy-makers.