Advocates for Youth partners with youth leaders, adult allies, and youth-serving organizations to advocate for policies and champion programs that recognize young people’s rights to honest sexual health information; accessible, confidential, and affordable sexual health services; and the resources and opportunities necessary to create sexual health 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. Advocates’ Youth Activist Network, currently 75,000 strong on 1,200 campuses and in hundreds of communities in the U.S. and more than 120 countries around the world, is core to the organization’s niche and brand.

Advocates’ role is to further nurture and support this pipeline of diverse youth leaders and to partner with them and their adult allies to boldly advocate for changes in the cultural and political environment and to champion program strategies that improve youth sexual health. To that end, Advocates also will work to build the capacity of youth-serving professionals to implement evidence- and rights-based sexual health strategies and to engage young people as partners in their work.

Advocates’ Youth Activist Network stands 100,000 strong on 1,000 campuses and in tens of thousands of communities.

Our Vision

Advocates for Youth envisions a society that views sexuality as normal and healthy and treats young people as a valuable resource.

The core values of Rights. Respect. Responsibility.® (3Rs) animate this vision:

RIGHTS: Youth have the right to accurate and complete sexual health information, confidential reproductive and sexual health services, and a secure stake in the future.

RESPECT: Youth deserve respect. Valuing young people means involving them in the design, implementation and evaluation of programs and policies that affect their health and well-being.

RESPONSIBILITY: Society has the responsibility to provide young people with the tools they need to safeguard their sexual health, and young people have the responsibility to protect themselves from too-early childbearing and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV.

Advocates for Youth EIN#  is 52-1173590.