For more than twenty years, the Ms. Foundation has invested in advocacy for comprehensive sexual health education across the United States with great success. Between 2006 and 2008 alone, our grantees had significant policy wins -- from the rejection of federal abstinence-only funding to mandated comprehensive sexual health education -- in six of ten targeted states.

Building off of these achievements, the Ms. Foundation has now turned our attention to address the urgent need for sexual health education in the US South – a region where you are more likely to have HIV, live below the federal poverty level and lack health insurance than any other in the country. A range of indicators, in fact, as well as a political culture that favors abstinence-only-until-marriage policies and prevents open discussion of sexuality, cry out for systemic social change.

In 2010, the Ms. Foundation for Women marked our transition to funding sexual health education in the South by delivering grants to three key organizations in Alabama – Alabama Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, AIDS Alabama, and Planned Parenthood Southeast. In a state where the legislature is governed by a Republican majority for the first time since Reconstruction, Alabama advocates (not unlike their neighbors) are preparing to face numerous challenges that directly and indirectly impact their work: amendments that would assign “personhood” rights to a fetus and undermine women’s reproductive rights, spousal rights campaigns that villainize LGBTQ communities, and dramatic cuts in social services.

In addition to grantmaking, the Ms. Foundation is also applying our “more-than-money” approach – a key strength of our Sexuality Education Advocacy Initiative (2005-11) and a core component of all of our funding. We’re bringing groups together – from Alabama and across the Southern region -- to build alliances, support peer learning, and offer targeted technical assistance to surmount the challenges of today’s political climate and ensure sexuality education in more schools throughout the South.

A New Beginning in Birmingham:
Creating Connections to Strengthen Sex Ed
In December 2010, in partnership with the New Morning Foundation and other Southern-based funders, the Ms. Foundation brought together 26 sexual health advocates from eight Southern states for intensive training, peer learning and collaboration. In a region where advocates say it is “literally not safe to do this work,” the Ms. Foundation connected participants – many of whom had never met – and began to build their capacity to advance a regional strategy for change. While these advocates and their organizations promote sexual health education within different contexts such as HIV/AIDS prevention or teen pregnancy prevention, each see it as key to advancing reproductive rights, health and justice for women and youth. Over the course of three days, participants engaged in lively discussion, shared best practices, and began to establish a common strategic approach to advancing comprehensive sex education region-wide.

Looking Ahead: Telling the Southern Story
With support from the Ms. Foundation, this group of local and state experts will march forward to continue to identify the many complex barriers to sexual health education in the South and create a shared strategy to overcome them. While sexual health education is often implemented on a local level – school by school, district by district – these advocates know that they will be ever more powerful if they are able to tell a unified Southern story and connect their local and state expertise to a regional movement for change.