I don’t want to hold out too much hope, but it’s looking like a very strong possibility that after I finish the pass pages I got given back for the book between today and tomorrow, after the parade of houseguests comes to an end, and now that I’m done with pretty much all the setup for this spring’s Scarleteen fundraising push, I may actually just get a whole day off.
Like, the kind where I don’t even have to do five minutes of ANY sort of work, not the kind I usually get, which is several hours of work, but a few hours of downtime. The kind where I can sleep in and not even check the email first thing when I wake up. Where I don’t even have to run errands. Where I can maybe start planning the garden for this year, take my dog out to a park, get a bike ride in if weather permits, take a long, long bath, and worry about no one’s needs but my own. Self-employed folks know all about this, the elusive myth of The Real Day Off. They know what I’m talkin’ about.
In any event, on top of getting back here to just talk about daily life schtuff, I will be doing my own blogging to try and raise funds for Scarleteen tomorrow, but for those of you not on my email lists, I wanted to get the basic information out there if you’d like to help (and I’d love it if you would: just blogging about sex ed and Scarleteen is really effective, since the more folks that do it, the wider our net spreads so that donors aren’t the same folks every time). For those of you who already got this, my apologies:
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I am writing you to ask for your help in a fundraising effort for Scarleteen we will be kicking off on Wednesday, February 14th.
Our most successful fundraising has always happened as a result of viral, community efforts online, and Id like to ask for your help to raise funds in this manner again next week. Word-of-mouth has been our best pal at Scarleteen: we serve tens of thousands of users every day, and we’ve never even had to run a single paid advertising campaign. Fundraising efforts also are most effective this way: when supporters of Scarleteen have blogged, posted at message boards or emailed en masse within their own networks to promote Scarleteen and to help raise funds it’s resulted in our best fundraising.
Scarleteen.com has been and remains a vital resource for young adults of all genders and orientations since December of 1998.
While since our launch then, other young adult sexuality sites have also come into being, I still feel that Scarleteen in particular serves needs which no other online resource does. For instance, there is no other website which is as fully inclusive of GLBT youth as Scarleteen is, and no other website which, while still serving immediate crises needs, engages users in ongoing, in-depth and informed dialogue about their sexuality and other related issues in such a holistic way. Because of Scarleteen’s heritage, the teens and young adults who use the site also express they experience a trust in us which enables them to ask questions they might not otherwise, and high-risk youth often disclose information about their risks more often than at other sites, allowing us to do our best to connect them with resources and services that protect them.
• For more on Scarleteen’s approach to sex education, go here.
• For more general information on Scarleteen, read up here.
• For information expressly for parents, check this out.
One of the big bonuses of blogging/writing to raise funds for Scarleteen is that it also raises awareness about the critical cultural need for sound sex education at the same time. Often, adults aren’t aware of how little comprehensive sex education teens are getting, for instance, or what abstinence-only sex education even entails. Or, how much of the sex information young adults get comes through unreliable sources such as peers, partners, pornography and general media (including arenas of media and entertainment which capitalize on misrepresenting teen sexuality). Or what the realities of teen and young adult sexuality even are right now: all too often, we assume that our experiences as young adults in this arena are unchanging universals, rather than an experience with some universals yet many variants, a good deal of which are highly influenced and steered by the immediate and ever-changing environments in which we come of age. Given how many of us would prefer to simply forget about the harsher, more difficult aspects of our adolescence, we’re also often prone to selective memory when it comes to sexuality in our formative years. 
Some topics you may consider writing about to raise funds and awareness are:
• Your personal experiences with sex education — good or ill — and how you feel that has influenced your sexual life and well-being. Posts like this can be particularly powerful for scarleteen when they come from a perspective of someone who we include in our education efforts, but which other programs or sites often do not: gay, lesbian or bisexual perspectives, those outside binary gender identities or outside gendernormativity, women, abuse survivors, those in alternative relationships, etc. If you’re someone of the age where Scarleteen was who provided your sex education, even better!
• How your sexuality — any or all aspects of it, positives and negatives — effects and has effected your life and/or identity as a whole.
• If you’re a parent, teacher or mentor of youth, teens or young adults, you can speak to your ideas/experience as to the import of comprehensive, inclusive sexuality education for this generation.
• The politics of sexuality education, young adult sexuality, women’s sexuality, sexual health or general sexuality, particularly in the United States.
• The perils of abstinence-only or much abstinence-based sex “education,” including purposeful misinformation and hyperbole, sexism, homophobia, gender inequities (for instance, young women are often given a clear message they are responsible for sexually policing both themselves and partners), lack of support for preventative sexual healthcare, sexual shame and body negativity.
When writing, blogging, emailing about these issues, it’s generally most effective to conclude with a pitch to donate, and a direct link to our donation page.
The following links provide supporting information, graphics and links for fundraising:
• Graphics for your blog, site or emails to promote Scarleteen and fundraising for Scarleteen are available here and a few more will be added over the next week.
• Here you’ll find a page explaining how we intend to use funds raised which you can link to and see for your own reference.
• Here is the page listing key issues pertinent to how we approach sex ed at Scarleteen, including extensive statistics and demographics.
• We’ll also be running a special area of the message boards for the fundraiser over the next few weeks. That area is at the message boards here and is also linked from the front page. It will include testimonials from Scarleteen users, so you can see what value they find in the site, as well as discussion topics relevant to their experiences with sex education, sexuality and related topics, other ways to give time, money and energy to support healthy young adult sexuality and well-being, and, just for kicks, an area of the boards where adults can come ask our users sexuality questions and test their knowledge. Too, we’ll add a thread for bloggers to either add their entries or link to them (so long as the sites/entries are appropriate for minors, please). Some of this area of the boards will be open to unregistered users, so feel free to come participate!
• I’d also like to ask you to consider making a donation of your own if you are able. This year, donors who give over $75 will receive a signed copy of my forthcoming young adult sexuality guide, S.E.X., mailed directly to them in April when the book is released.
(And by all means, feel free to circulate this information as you’d like.)
Thanks so much in advance for doing what you can to help, whatever that may be.
Without the support of so many of you over the years, there’s no way we’d still be around. In the macrocosm, everyone’s efforts to help sustain us truly have helped more young adults than most of us can fathom. On a more personal level, this work has turned out to be the most enriching — albeit some of the most difficult — work I have done in my life, and everyone’s faith in me and in the aims of this work have been invaluable.
Thank you!
HEATHER CORINNA
Founder & Editor, Scarleteen.com
