Reprolatina

Partnership and participation are central to Reprolatina's approach. The NGO works in partnership with adolescents, educators, the public health system, community groups, and local leadership. Every member of Reprolatina's full-time, paid youth team grew up in the communities the organisation serves. Reprolatina seeks to forge strong adult-youth partnerships within the organisation, guided by an overall philosophy that values process, teamwork, solidarity, and participation. Together, they have built an organisational culture that is designed to support and nourish youth staff members as individuals, giving them opportunities to grow both personally and professionally. Eight elements of Reprolatina's philosophy have informed their efforts to put youth participation into practice:

1. Everyone is inherently capable (staff use the Portuguese word capaz, which evokes profound capacity - a person who not only has skills, but is also trustworthy, competent, and conscientious).
2. Everyone has a right to participate.
3. Participation should be effective, not decorative.
4. Participation is a process.
5. The workplace should support individual growth and development.
6. Gender issues should be addressed openly.
7. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand.
8. Hierarchy can be horizontal.

At Reprolatina, youth staff develop and implement a variety of communication-centred initiatives. For example, in 1999, one of the organisation's adolescent health promoters (who was taking an information technology course), decided to build a youth-friendly website to provide Brazilian adolescents with confidential access to information on sexual and reproductive health in straightforward language, as well as provide a forum where they could submit questions via e-mail. His idea resulted in the creation of Living Adolescence (Vivendo a Adolescência), which is developed and maintained by youth staff (with technical support from adult professionals). Among the features of this interactive website are videos that demonstrate how to use both male and female condoms. Responsibility for answering visitors' questions on sexual and reproductive health, which arrive daily through the Tira Grilo or "Doubt Remover" section, is shared equally among the members of the youth team. Youth staff draft the responses, which are then reviewed by an adult professional and posted on the site within 48 hours.

Face-to-face interactions (youth-to-youth) are also key means of sharing health information. In 2001, Reprolatina established a cadre of adolescent health promoters within the Guarda Mirim, an NGO in Santa Bárbara that trains adolescents in office skills and then places them in local companies. Initiated and implemented largely by Reprolatina's youth team, this project draws on the interpersonal interactions facilitated by the Guarda, which provides a place where adolescents congregate, in order to reach more young people in the community with information on health, rights, and prevention. The health promoters, called Adolescent Volunteers Instructing in Sexuality and Prevention (Adolescente Voluntarios/as Instruindo Sexualidade e Prevenção) - AVISP - serve as resources on sexual and reproductive health for their peers, conducting horizontal, peer-to-peer bate papos informativos ("informational chats"), as well as distributing informational materials, providing individual advice, and linking adolescents with the public health system. Since 2001, Reprolatina's youth team have trained over 60 health promoters. To foster sustainability of the AVISP programme, they also trained a young staff member at the Guarda to serve as coordinator of the AVISP group.

The youth team also undertakes youth outreach and representation. Team members have developed printed educational and advocacy materials, such as a booklet on sexually transmitted infections called DST: Que Bicho é Este? ("STDs: What Are They?"), and posters on sexual and reproductive rights (developed as part of a 2004 advocacy kit). They also lobby for issues such as a review of the Brazilian Adolescents' Movement (Movimento de Adolescentes Brasileiros - MAB - a network with about 50 groups from different cities and states) statutes from a gender perspective. They have represented Reprolatina at municipal health council meetings in Santa Bárbara, in national advocacy and policy dialogues across Brazil, and at international meetings, conferences, and trainings across North and South America.

Although the communities from which youth staff hail, and which they serve, are located in a relatively developed region of Brazil as compared with economically poorer northern and northeastern states, they still face high rates of poverty, unemployment, and violence and limited access to information and services on sexual and reproductive health. At Reprolatina, offering paid positions to youth who had already been engaged in peer education was part of a strategy for giving committed young people the means to continue their advocacy while financing their educations. One youth staff member explains, "When I was seventeen, I wanted to be a psychologist, but I didn't have any money for university, and I had no idea how to get a scholarship." Trained as an adolescent health promoter as part of AVISP in 1996, she was hired as Reprolatina youth staff in 2002 and is currently in her third year of psychology studies.