Delsie works with Advocates for Youth and the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina (APPCNC) as a member of the North Carolina Teen Health Now Council.

I am Delsie-Anne Bailey- student, daughter, and mother. I enjoyed to pleasures of the average teenager and lived a fairly simple life until December 22, 2008. On that day, my life as I knew it turned upside down and my priorities soon flipped. I was now a mother, daughter, and then a student and with that shift in life came the passion to be involved in activism in the youth and sexual health and rights movement. With the birth of my little girl I now lived a very different life than I had planned and I now had a story to tell and a message that needed to be heard. It is this very message that motivates me to do the work that I do.

Schools are supposed to be the place for education but yet it seems that when it comes to the “need to knows”, teens sadly still “need to know”. We are simply uninformed when it comes to sexual health and the numbers of teen pregnancies and STI’s that ruin lives are proof of that simple fact. What I want for the young people of my generation and of future generations is the simple- EDUCATION. I want sexual education to be something that is discussed in schools- and not just among peers as they walk down the hallways. I want young people to know the troubles and toils that come with teen pregnancies and I want them to know what to do to prevent them. I simply want education where there is none. I advocate for sexual health and rights because I’ve felt the effects of a lack of information. I advocate because I want change for the daughter that I am raising. But most importantly I advocate for youth sexual health and rights because I am a youth and my voice needs to be heard.