Advocates for Youth

Advocates for Youth partners with young people and their adult allies to champion youth rights to bodily autonomy and build power to transform policies, programs and systems to secure sexual health and equity for all youth.

Advocates believes it can best serve the field, and ultimately have the largest impact on improving youth sexual health and rights, by working in partnership with youth and their adult allies, including youth-serving institutions. Doing so, we will be able to shift the current cultural paradigm in which we live from one that too often stigmatizes youth and youth sexual development to one that embraces youth as partners and recognizes sexuality as normal and healthy. Advocates recognizes that poverty, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, racism, and sexism fuel sexual health disparities. The organization seeks to redress these social determinants by working in coalition with economic and social justice organizations and by engaging, empowering, and mobilizing young people from marginalized communities to serve as activists and leaders in the field of sexual health.