What is Outreach?
Outreach work involves actively connecting with individuals or groups in one’s community and providing them with targeted support, resources, and services. This work often focuses on vulnerable populations like the homeless, at-risk youth, or the elderly, and helps bridge the gaps to essential services like healthcare, housing, and counseling. It brings the services to those who may not have access to them or know that they even exist. Sexual Health Outreach is a combination of offering both products and education to support everyone’s ability to manage one’s sexual wellness with safer sex options.
What is Safer Sex?
Safer sex is sexual activity that lowers the chances of unintended pregnancy and getting a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Safer sex has many components within that definition. CATIE, Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange, lists some of these safer sex components as the following:
- about knowing your options.
- for everyone – no matter your age, race, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, number of partners, relationship status or whether you’ve been diagnosed with an STI before.
- being comfortable with what you’re doing and being able to talk to your partners about what you do and don’t want.
- sex that considers your plans around pregnancy.
- about choosing options that lower the chance of passing or getting STIs and keep you and your partners healthy.
- taking steps to get tested for STIs if you are sexually active and getting treatment if you are diagnosed with an STI.
- fun, stimulating, exciting and erotic.
But that messaging and the products to support that messaging require a comprehensive outreach program to ensure the target audiences are receiving them.
What Does Outreach Look Like?
Outreach is a multi-faceted wellness approach. It requires a combination of awareness, often through educational supplies, along with the products for people to use to manage their sexual wellness. Educational outreach is something that can be offered in many different public settings such as offices, clinics, public washrooms, shelters, on bus or subway signage, as well as directly to individuals through street programs, schools, doctor offices, and product dispensers.
Assorted items that support directed educational messaging are posters, pamphlets, handouts, digital resources, digital informational clips, stickers, sexual education kits for workshops, and custom messaging through newsletters or emails. These assorted products help with creating and presenting targeted messaging that oft times need to direct and concise.
Education and awareness then require reinforcement through the products that can support the messaging. For safer sex outreach this includes various products such as external condoms offered in both latex and non-latex, FC2 internal condoms, oral barriers (available in both latex and polyisoprene), lubricants, and safer sex kits. Many of these items can be offered to end users through wellness dispensers that can be a discreet manner of distribution.
When Does Outreach Work?
The easy answer is ALWAYS! Using targeted campaigns can definitely get out a message. And outreach campaigns based on specific events like SexPlus Week (February 10-16) are a great platform to launch from.
Outreach for sexual wellness in Canada is a critical approach that connects with priority populations to reduce the transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and prevent unintended pregnancies. By bringing these assorted resources directly to communities, outreach addresses many different social and financial barriers to safer sex options. It reduces the stigma attached to sexual wellness, offers privacy, can help teach responsible sexual behavior options, and presents targeted communication to aid in awareness and education. It is only through offering both the education and the tools to support it that we can see people manage their sexual wellness.