Mission

FoSE’s mission is to champion sex education and create conditions that prioritize and protect the wellbeing of all young people. Through collaborative strategies, FoSE aims to build a national foundation that empowers policymakers, school administrators, and educators to implement and sustain sex education and cultivate supportive learning environments. FoSE partners seek to maximize their impact by leveraging organizational capacities and expertise in a coordinated manner, strengthening their collective contribution to the field of sex education.

Values

FoSE believes that—

• sexuality is a natural and healthy part of every person’s humanity; 
• all young people deserve to be affirmed and thrive in all their identities;
• all young people have the right to sex education, Pre-K–12, as it sets the foundation for healthy relationships and achieving life-long sexual health;
• parents/caregivers play a vital role in supporting and affirming young people’s sexual development at home, in school, and in their communities;
• schools are uniquely positioned to provide a foundation of sex education for young people due to the more than 56 million students who spend their day in school; and,
• community-based and online programs further supplement and reinforce school-based sex education and are often best positioned to meet the diverse and unique needs of young people. 

History

The Future of Sex Education (FoSE) Initiative was launched in July 2007 as a partnership between Advocates for Youth, Answer, and the SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change at a time when a large proportion of states had rejected federal abstinence-only funding and research commissioned by the federal government  confirmed what previous studies had found: abstinence-only education is not effective in delaying teen sex.  

The FoSE partners believe that, as a collective, we can more effectively leverage our organizational work, our alliances, and our relationships and foster mutually reinforcing strategies to create change and shift cultural and political paradigms. 

If you are interested in learning more about the numerous projects the FoSE partners have successfully completed to advance the collective effort of improving sexuality education in U.S. schools, click here.