SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change

SIECUS is a national, nonprofit organization that works to advance sex education for social change. Since 1964, SIECUS has effectively advocated for the right of all people to accurate information about sexuality and sexual health, comprehensive sexuality education, sexual health services, and sexual rights. We focus our efforts within three interconnected areas: policy and advocacy, education and resource development, and strategic communications.

Over the last 55 years, SIECUS’ efforts have led to some major social, educational, and legislative advances in sexual and reproductive health and rights, including publishing the first-ever Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education for the United States and supporting the establishment and protection of federal funding streams that can support sex education for young people.

SIECUS currently uses a Strategic Framework to guide its work, and espouses the following values that shape and inform our approach:

• SIECUS recognizes that good sexual and reproductive health is a human right.
• SIECUS advances comprehensive sexuality education as a means of building a foundation for a long-term culture shift that will positively impact all levels of society, particularly issues of gender equity, sexuality, sexual and reproductive health, consent, personal safety, and autonomy.
• SIECUS uses a rights-based framework to inform our approach, reshaping cultural and societal narratives of sexuality and sexual and reproductive health.
• SIECUS commits to working to dismantle the systems of power and oppression which perpetuate disparate sexual and reproductive health outcomes and incubates stigma and shame around sex and sexuality across the intersections of age, race, size, gender, gender identity and expression, class, sexual orientation, and ability.
• SIECUS applies an intersectional lens to ensure people’s real lived experiences inform our policy, education, and strategic communications work.