Let’s talk about sex

Name of the activity: Let’s talk about sex.

Country/NMO: Slovenia (SloMSIC)

Program: Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

Type of the activity: Education. Education on health issues for specific societal groups, either in the form of projects (set of tasks for a certain group over a fixed period of time), events (something notable that happens) or conferences (form meeting about ideas related to a particular topic, usually over several days).

General description:

Our project was established to promote safe and consensual sex among youth. It is based on no formal peer to peer CSE, because in our country the CSE classes are not part of the formal education system. Our project has 40 specially trained instructors (medical students) with in-depth knowledge of the material at hand and a keen sense of communication, as well as a shameless approach. Our mission is to provide information for youth in a relaxed atmosphere that will break down taboos connected to sexuality, but also lower the rates of the negative aspects of sexuality including STIs and unwanted pregnancies in teens. Our workshops take about 90 minutes and annually reach around 1000 pupils. Besides the CSE workshops we also organize stands where we try to lower the stigma surrounding people living with HIV and lower the discrimination of the LGBTQ+ community.

We are proud to say that the objectives of our mission are being realized year after year with noted growth and expansion.

Focus area:

Comprehensive Sexuality Education

Problem statement:

Young adults want more information about SRHR trough the formal education, but CSE isnt an essential part of the schooling system. The main source of information still being the internet with unverified information.

We already see a decrease in STIs which is attributed to consistent and systematic delivery of information to the general public in the past years.

A lot of people don’t get tested for HIV because of the high stigma.

We still face discrimination of the LGBTA+ community.

Target groups:

General population, Medical students, Youth

Beneficiaries:

General population, Medical students, Youth, LGBTQIA+ community

Objectives and indicators of success:

• successfully deliver at least 50 CSE workshops on 25 different schools where we will reach around 1000 pupils

• teach at least 1000 pupils how to properly use a condom

• promote tolerance and respect for LGBT + community at at least 50 different lectures

• establish a closer collaboration with sister project under our and other NMOs in order to share experiences and best practices to improve our project

• publish 3 new handouts on the topics of SRHR and STIs so we can spread our message easier

• review our workshops and try to improve them

• have 4 movie nights on topics related to SRHR or LGBTQ+ organized for medical students

• organize a lecture on one of the topics of sexuality with a physiology professor in April

• organize an internal education day for out instructors to learn the topics of the workshops that they are facilitating more in debt

• expand the reach of our CSE workshops to 4 new schools this school year

• organise a congress on sex change in November which will educate around 50-100 students on this less known topic

• have informative stands on the topic or IDAHOT (on 17.5.), international AIDS day(on 1.12.) and HPV day(on 4.3.)

Methodology:

Most of our objectives can be achieved via no formal peer to peer CSE workshops in grade schools, high schools and other formal education institutions.

We organize stands throughout our town where we inform the general public about the LGBTQ+ community, try to decrease the stigma surrounding HIV infection and people living with AIDS and raise awareness on matters concerning STIs with the main focus on HPV. At these times we also hand out condoms and written information about various SRHR topics.

We share various info about STIs and SRHR on our Facebook page.

We try to organize a congress and various lectures based of the topics of SRHR and STIs to mainly educate medical students.

Plans for evaluation:

We evaluate our activities from the gathered feedback of the students and the questions which were asked during the workshops. One of the best feedbacks are collected from the carriers of the formal educational institutes who contact us every year in order to carry out a CSE workshop for a new generation of pupils.

This school year we are also in the process of making an evaluation form that will allow us to gather feedback from the students and teachers and which we will be able to use to improve our CSE workshops.

The success of the stands is measured by the number of handouts.

The last monitoring tool is to look at all the SMART goals we have set for the previous year and evaluate how well we managed to accomplish them.