Causes: Children & Youth, Youth Development

Mission: Empower youth with education, knowledge, tools and support to make healthy decisions and positive life choices including postponing sexual activity until marriage.

Programs: Free to be was able to reach 2,600 youth with a positive message of risk avoidance and healthy decision making through several different educational components. This exceeds our original projected amount by 600 students. We were able to train and support 20 high school-aged peer educators, as well as continue to develop our adult mentor program to provide additional support to our peer educators. Free to bes message to the youth in sonoma county has always been about empowering them with the knowledge to make healthy choices now to prepare them for successful futures. During the 2015-2016 school year, we continued to partner with schools, youth serving organizations and families, and provide educational components that create collective impact on positive youth development. As always, our educational components are geared at increasing protective factors and decreasing risk factors among youth. Free to bes educational components address a range of positive youth development objectives: strengthen social, emotional, cognitive and behavior competencies, self-efficacy, and family and community standards for healthy social and personal behavior. We also target healthy bonds between youth and adults, and increase opportunities for youth participation in positive social activities. Since we began in 1992, free to be has reached just over 90,000 students through our teen panel presentation and other educational components, and we have trained and mentored close to 500 peer educators.