Funding and Delivering Youth Transition Programs: One CIL S Experience with Sexuality Education

Funding and Delivering Youth Transition Programs: One CIL’s Experience with Sexuality Education

Presented by Alie Kriofske on September 10, 2014

JEFF SHEEN: Welcome to the funding and delivering youth transition programs: One CIL's experience with sexuality education webinar presented by Alie Kriofske. Today's webinar is being offered by the New Community Opportunities Center at ILRU and national training and technical assistance project of ILRU, the Independent Living Research Utilization program in Houston, Texas.
This presentation is being funded by the US Department of Education's Rehabilitation Services Administration, and no official endorsement of the department should be inferred.
We are recording today's presentation as we always do, and you will be able to access the presentation within 48 hours under the on demand trainings tab on the ILRU website. So you can review it later or share it with your colleagues. On the website, you will be able to access the PowerPoint slides, listen to the audio, and read the captioning, whatever works best for you.
We will break several times during today's presentation to take your questions. If you are on the phone, you can press star pound to ask a question, and if you are on the computer, you can type your questions in the chat box and hit enter or click on the thought bubble icon to the right of the text entry box. We will wait until the Q&A break to address submitted questions in the order in which they are received.
If you are using the captioning today, you can ask questions in the stream text using the link in the bottom left-hand box. Staff will then post those questions in the public chat on the webinar platform. Our presenter will try to get to as many questions as we have time for, but keep in mind that we also need to cover the material in the presentation in a timely manner.
Any questions that we're not able to address on the webinar today will be responded to offline in a written format that will be sent out to participants.
You will remind you of all of these instructions, especially the telephone instruction, star pound, when we come to each question and answer section of the presentation. The material for today's presentation, including the PowerPoint slides and the link to the evaluation form were sent to you in the confirmation email you received shortly before the webinar. And, of course, if you are joining us by computer, the PowerPoint slides will be displayed automatically. You don't have to do anything. If you are on the telephone only or reading the full-screen CART captioning, you may want to have the PowerPoint slides printed out or at least open on your computer.
That will make today's presentation a lot easier to follow along with. If you didn't realize you needed the slides, you can get them again in the confirmation email attachment.
Also fill out the evaluation form that was in your participant guide, and will appear. It's important to get your feedback regarding this presentation. We want to know what you think about this presentation today, so please do fill that out.
Finally, before I introduce today's presenter, I would like to give you a brief overview of how this webinar fits into the big picture of the New Community Opportunities project. This presentation is part of a series of trainings and other activities provided to the IL field by the New Community Opportunities Center at ILRU. The project's purpose is to assist CILs in developing self-sustaining programs that support community alternatives to institutionalization for individuals of any age and youth transition from school to postsecondary education, employment, and community living. ILRU's partners and collaborators on the project include Utah State University's center for persons with disabilities, the National Youth Leadership Network, the National Council On Independent Living, Suzanne Crisp, a national community alternatives expert, Michele Martin, social media consultant and the Association of Programs for Rural Independent Living.
Now without further delay, I would like to welcome and introduce our presenter, Ms. Alie Kriofske. Alie has been working as a support person, mentor, and educator. She came to IndependenceFirst as a Marquette University graduate school intern, while she obtained her master's degree in public service, focusing on disability rights and the disability movement.
After graduation, she found she did not want to leave the agency. So she proposed a new youth-focused position to the executive director who accepted it. Alie now continues her work at IndependenceFirst as the youth leadership specialist, working with young persons with disabilities in transition, self-advocacy and independent living skills training.
During the paragraph few years she's been teaching sexuality education and healthy relationships to youth with disability and currently working on her certification as a sexuality educator.
We will now begin the presentation and I will turn it over to you, Alie.
> ALIE KRIOFSKE: Thank you, Jeff. Hello, everybody. It's nice to see -- well, not see so many people. I'm glad that so many people could join us today.
So as Jeff said, I'm Alie. I'm the youth leadership specialist at IndependenceFirst, and IndependenceFirst, for those people who haven't heard of it is a Center for Independent Living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And we serve the four most heavily populated counties of the southeastern region of Wisconsin and part of a network of eight other Independent Living Centers in Wisconsin.
So we do what other Independent Living Centers do, and I feel very privileged and fortunate to work for IndependenceFirst and to have the opportunity to talk to you today about youth programs and sexuality education.
So we'll go -- we'll talk about the learning objectives today and the learning objectives are to come up with some ideas and tools and resources that you can use as a Center for Independent Living to bring sexuality education and relationship education to your consumers as a skill in independent living.
We'll talk about IndependenceFirst's best practices and the population of consumers that we serve, that have been proven most effective and sustainable for our center and that hopefully could be some ideas that would be useful for yours. And to describe the value of empowering youth, adolescents and adults with disabilities to negotiate their way through all of the different aspects of life that have to do with relationships and sexuality.
And then finally, to look at opportunities for funding and sometimes those opportunities for funding come better with collaboration with other organizations. So I will talk to you about how we have done it, at least, to make our program possible.
I am aware that many of you are from centers of independent living and so telling you what Independent Living Centers do is something you already know; however, I imagine perhaps some people on the call are new to independent living or aren't from an Independent Living Center.
So just a brief review, Centers for Independent Living, our job is to really operate under the IL philosophy, independent living philosophy, which is that all people have the right to be fully included in their communities. People with disabilities, people without disabilities, all people have the right, right?
So we teach skills that help people with disabilities do that, and those skills include living where they choose to live, working in a meaningful career or job, having different opportunities to participate in their communities, whether it's through recreation, whether it's through employment or relationships. That's what centers do, right?
And so I want to just talk about what centers don't teach and that's the next slide. So Centers for Independent Living teach all of these wonderful skills for independent living and we know, as human beings, we are social creatures and relationships and sexuality are an integral part of being a human being, yet centers for independent living generally don't teach relationships or sexuality as a rule. It's generally not found in our curriculum.
So we teach IL Skills and we talk about how to live independently, but we often don't talk about sexuality. So the next slide, please.
So this is how IndependenceFirst started teaching sex ed. We received federal funding to provide independent living skills training as one of our four core services, and so as a part of that, we have a curriculum that was developed by a number of our staff and director teams called "Everything You Wanted to Know About Being an Adult But Were Afraid to Ask."
And that curriculum has been taught to high school students and I have brought it into the middle school as well to talk to younger students. We also have a curriculum that's a general IL curriculum for adults with much of the same material and that curriculum includes things such as self-advocacy, understanding your disability, knowing the laws that protect you as a person with a disability, and then other subjects such as conflict resolution, time management, money management.
So one session in that curriculum is called, "Go Ahead, Make My Day. Boundaries and Personal Space."
So that session is just about boundaries and personal space and I began teaching that session. What it covered in the generally one hour that the Tom allotted was boundaries and personal space, which included talking about distance and space and really measuring kind of personal bubbles and how we shouldn't stand too close to people, and touch and that kind of thing.
It covered healthy versus unhealthy relationships, and it covered community safety. All of that in one hour. And so that's what that one session covered. Next slide, please.
So what happened is it became clearer in the end of these sessions, when I would teach this class, that the kids had a lot of questions and the teachers would say, we need more on this.
So I came up with a five-week class, which I pulled from our own IL curriculum, I pulled from other curricula that I could find on healthy relationships and boundaries and I made a five-week class that I called "Safe Relationships, Safe Places." So first week of that class, we covered boundaries and personal space. Then we got to really flesh out, like, what does it mean to have boundaries, both in terms of space and in terms of how much of yourself you are willing to share with another person, and who are the appropriate people to share certain things with, right?
The second session is healthy versus unhealthy relationships. So we would take time to really talk about some qualities you would see in a healthy relationship, qualities you would see in an unhealthy relationship, what that looks like, and what you can do if your relationship is unhealthy.
The third session was dating and romance. So a lot of fun. Everybody gets to talk about stuff they see on TV and whether it's a myth or a fact about relationships, what is the difference between a crush and real love and all of that kind of stuff.
And the fourth session, we talked about sexual harassment and abuse prevention. So really kind of relationship safety, what to do if you are doing abused what is abuse and harassment look like? And then what to do if it's happening to you or someone you know? And then finally the last session, we spent on community safety and talked a lot about, you know, just being out in the community, how to be safe, how to keep yourselves protected at home when you are home alone, or when you are out in the community alone. So that's -- that was what we were doing for a long time.
Next slide. Oh, look at that.
Yeah, that's right. So funding, we were already receiving at this point little pieces of funding from small foundations for our youth program and our youth program was fairly new when this started. And so we had been receiving a large grant from the Department of Health and Family Services for programs serving people with disabilities who were victims of abuse, and we had two staff that were doing that work full time, really helping people who were in abusive situations, who were not able to access shelters who were not able to access programs, who were dependent on a caregiver who was abusing them and therefore felt they couldn't leave. So there were so many different issues facing victims of abuse who also have disabilities and so we had a big program serving in that capacity.
So during that time, the staff member who was really starting to do that very full-time asked me if I would take over all of the healthy relationship classes at IndependenceFirst, and so at that point, we applied for a three-year cycle of this same DHFS, Department of Health and Family Services grant, and we got it.
So that funding covered our youth program, specifically the abuse and the relationships stuff, from 2009 to 2012. And it covered my salary. It covered the salary of our other full-time staff who is dedicated to working in the abuse area and she was part of who is responsible for creating the Disability Abuse Response Team, also known as DART. Many of you on the call may be familiar with DART. And so she was funded and we had another staff who was also helping who was funded under this grant.
What are we included in terms of our youth program was the safe relationship, safe places classes. We also run GirlsFirst support groups. So these are support groups that are for girls with disabilities. I was trained by Access Living in Chicago. I don't know if anyone is on the line from Chicago. I haven't had a chance to peek at the participants, but if there is, Access Living in Chicago has a fantastic youth program and they had a training for people who wanted to run a girls support program. So I received their training and started running GirlsFirst support groups which also we included in this funding.
The one-time boundaries and personal space sessions that were already a part of our IL curriculum and then finally, in the summertime, we run a camp called the Youth Leadership Summit and it's a week-long camp that we run twice for two groups of 25 youth with disabilities. And the third day of the five days we dedicate to healthy relationships, sexual assault prevention, dating and romance, and so that day of the youth summit was also covered under those -- under that funding.
So as we taught this safe relationships class, what happened -- kind of how the sex ed program started at IndependenceFirst, I was teaching the safe relationships class, talking about dating and romance and sexuality comes up, because it's an integral part for people of dating and romance. And so we were talking about sex, and it was pretty clear that the students -- many of the students in the class did not know how a pregnancy occurs. And the teacher said, Alie, tell them. Tell them how babies are made. And so it really put me on the spot, but it was a really wonderful feeling to be able to tell a group of students something they had never heard from anyone else. These are high school students, many of them 18. And they were learning something that is such an important part of being a human being that they had never heard before and it was really exciting for them to talk about it.
So we started to talk more deeply about sexuality in those classes where it was allowed, where teachers were supportive, and then I put together a three-part workshop on sex ed. And later on, I will share lots of resources for all of you, but that particular resource that I drew from at this point was created by Planned Parenthood in New England, and it is specifically a workshop that is designed for adults with developmental disabilities.
So I pulled from that workshop and developed a three-part sex ed class and that was immediately popular. People wanted me to come teach that class.
And so I decided that though I really love doing it, it would probably be smart for me to get educated and so I began the process of becoming a certified sexuality educator, and I'm still working on that process now. And I'm doing that through the American association of sexuality educators, counselors and therapists, also called AASECT.
So at this point we are receiving the DHFS grant, again still from 2008 to 2011. We received a small grant, usually about $10,000 a year from the Jane Bradley Petit Foundation. It's a local foundation in Milwaukee. And we received that from 2007 to 2011. And then we were left under funded for one year, 2012, we lost our Department of Health funding. They sort of took their funding in another direction, and so we didn't receive the grant in 2012. We only were receiving a few small items from other foundations and funders, and so what happened, I guess, what I think is a wonderful thing about Independent Living Centers is that we're consumer controlled and driven, right?
So we drive our services by what our consumers want and I feel very fortunate to be working at a center that not only has a healthy budget and is able to sort of make risky decisions but also a very supportive board and director who though my program wasn't really fully funded, just let me keep going and trusted that we would find more funding.