Foreword
Written by Tomei Kuehl of Consulting Within Your Context
It has been an honor and a privilege to work alongside Trailhead Institute, the Youth Sexual Health Program Board, Talia Cardin, and the young people who provided artwork for this project. The goal of this project was to explore what anti-oppressive sex education means and why it matters. We could not have imagined the ways this project evolved.
From the outset we created space to dream something new for the SASH report. We leaned into the process of bringing together a diverse group of people with lived experience, who are not paid as a part of their work to sit on boards and committees. We paid them for their time upfront and understood that life may get in the way of meeting participation and found creative ways to engage beyond meetings. We met with potential board members ahead of time to share the vision and hope for this work. We acknowledged that we did not know what the outcome would be, and within that uncertainty, would focus on the process to ensure transparency, accountability, equity, and most importantly flexibility to dream, imagine, and grow. We fielded hard and valid questions about our intent with this project. You can learn more about the many lessons we learned in this process in the Lessons Learned section of this website.
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The Youth Sexual Health Program Board met during the last six months of 2021 to develop recommendations and action steps to improve sexual health in Colorado. Four themes (core boundaries) arose that guided the development of the SASH report: 1) Intersectionality is necessary to understand the way different identities are impacted by systems of oppression; 2) Pleasure-based sexual health is required; 3) Different forms of oppression (isms) must be defined and connected to our existing sex education system; and 4) Equitable access to sex education for everyone across the whole spectrum of humans is a necessity.
A further priority in this project was the centering of youth voice. The Youth Sexual Health Program Board was comprised of both adults and young people, and to ensure youth voice was further centered, Talia Cardin and Isa Hussain created and facilitated two Pleasure Artshops with students at AUL Denver and young people at Inside Out Youth Services. This culminated in 24 pieces of art achieving the goal of centering youth voice in the conversation and using nontraditional data (i.e., artwork) to understand sexual health — a first for the SASH report! You can view the beautiful artwork and read artist statements as well as learn about the ways different forms of oppression have informed and created our existing sex education approach. This historical context is necessary because it impacts sexual health education today and in order to dream of a new way, focused on pleasure and joy, there needs to be a reckoning of how we got here.
Finally, this website serves to bring everything together. The SASH reminds us of our history and its impact on sexual health and couples this history with liberating practices and anti-oppressive recommendations developed by the Youth Sexual Health Program Board. There are five sectors identified in the anti-oppressive recommendations section and each sector is defined by the role it plays in sexual health. Further, isms that impact these sectors are identified to begin building awareness for addressing the role these isms play. The anti-oppressive recommendations for action are not meant to be a checklist; rather, they are a contemplation and a call to action that is necessary and will be uncomfortable. And the discomfort is necessary to meaningfully address the overlapping and complex systems of oppression at work. Together we can do so much.
We invite you to join us.
— Tomei Kuehl
Untitled artwork by Aves (He/It), a young person from Inside Out Youth Services
Partnering With
Consulting Within Your Context
As Trailhead began to map out plans for engaging a Youth Sexual Health Program Board and developing the SASH report, Trailhead quickly realized its own limitations and biases, recognizing that an investment in external support would be essential to disrupting the historical processes of engagement that the SASH report has utilized. Trailhead’s Youth Sexual Health Program partnered with Consulting Within Your Context to hold the organization accountable and support Trailhead in intentionally centering an anti-oppressive framework into every aspect of the process, a decision that was pivotal in creating space for change. You can learn more about this process on the Lessons Learned page.
Building From a Shared Foundation for Youth Sexual Health Education
The 2023 SASH report begins by establishing a set of core boundaries as the basis of what youth sexual health education in Colorado must reflect.