Freedman, Ethan
11/11/25
Columbia University School for Social Work, New York
Submitted in partial fulfillment as Assignment Two within the requirements for Columbia's School for Social Work program and Prof. Russell Baptist's Program Planning and Development class.
Acknowledgements:
In introducing the following work, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
I would also like to acknowledge Professor Russell Baptist and their facilitation of SOCWT7122. With Prof. Baptist's lecturers, recommended readings, and my additional thoughts – this piece took form. Moreover, all my peers in class who contributed to discussions and building ideas that related to the present topic. With these acknowledgements, I present my following work.
Founded in 1964 by Dr. Mary Calderon, Sex Ed for Social Change is a national nongovernmental organization (NGO) that advances comprehensive sexuality education through advocacy, policy engagement, and coalition building. Its mission posits that sex education is a vehicle for social change and that "social justice is inclusive of sexual and reproductive rights" (SIECUS, n.d.a, para 1). SIECUS is firmly committed to dismantling systems of power and oppression that perpetuate inequities in sexual and reproductive health outcomes (SIECUS, n.d.a.). Positioning the SIECUS organizational structure and strategy within a program planning, PROP (power, race, oppression, and privilege), and human centered social work lens demonstrates how intentional planning and participatory research can transform sexuality education from a public health intervention into a foundation for collective social justice efforts.
SIECUS Praxis: Sustaining Community Impact and Mission Alignment
The impact of SIECUS on its community lies in its role as a national policy advocate and coalition partner. Through its State Profiles, the organization documents "a patchwork of laws relating to sex education with varying requirements, provisions, and restrictions," that contribute to inequitable access to information across the United States (SIECUS, 2021, para 1). This data set affirms advocacy campaigns that promote inclusive curricula with capacities to address consent, sexual orientation, gender identity, and reproductive rights, something Bryson and Alston (2011) contextualized with the notion that nonprofit planning requires clearly articulated missions and stakeholder engagement. David (2020) observes that well operationalized mission statements clarify organizational purpose, a concept reiterated by the Social Enterprise Alliance (2010) description of missions as a "compass" guiding all activities (p.10). With a commitment to "advancing sex education through advocacy, policy, and coalition efforts that center equity, justice, and human rights," intersectionality and inclusion appear at the surface of SIECUS.
Initiatives like State Profiles on Sex Education, The Sex Ed for Social Change Campaign, and partnerships with reproductive justice organizations SisterSong, Advocates for Youth, and the National Coalition for Sex Education Advocates illustrate the tangible influence of SIECUS on U.S. sexuality education and policy. Supporting policies backed by data and community storytelling to bolster reform and education, SIECUS shapes both legislation and public thought on comprehensive sex education best practices (CSE). The organization's work contributes to the expansion of curricula in several states. and to policy rhetoric that explicitly incorporates LGBTQIA+ inclusion, consent, and gender identity (SIECUS, 2022). Operating at levels of federal and state advocacy, Brown and Wyatt (2010) situate effective innovation depends on empathy and building policy "with" communities rather than "for" them (p. 32). SIECUS offers feedback mechanisms, advisory councils, and youth participation paths to ensure that reform efforts reflect the realities of those most affected by inequitable access to sex education.
The application of SWOT upon SIECUS highlights the organizations national credibility, coalition networks, and policy influence as strengths, while weaknesses glare around funding grants and diversifying leadership (Keela, n.d.). Opportunities to include digital literacy curriculums and policy reform exist in partnering with organizations that have branching missions, but threats from politics and misinformation pervade in this work. Stemming from adaptive and iterative planning, SIECUS continues to translate public health evidence into community driven advocacy outcomes that demonstrate the value of aligning mission clarity with addressing systemic issues.
SIECUS PROP Rhetoric: Dismantling Inequities in Sexual Health Policy
When considering PROP frameworks in tandem with SIECUS, the organization's role as an external advocate for structural oppression is clear. Internally embedding resistance to oppression as a core value across its planning and implementation exemplifies how organizations are "arenas for internal politics and political agents" (Bolman and Deal, 2008, p. 229). This applies to SIECUS considering their leadership increasingly reflects the communities it serves in efforts to advance representation of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color within national policy spaces historically dominated by whiteness and heteronormativity. With a commitment to dismantling the "systems of power and oppression which perpetuate disparate sexual and reproductive health outcomes and incubate stigma and shame around sex and sexuality across the intersections of age, race, size, gender, gender identity and expression, class, sexual orientation, and ability," SIECUS's institutional positionality reflects the notion that PROP must "intervene and interrupt systemic oppression… and explore how white supremacy has been positioned as a dominant system" (Altaha et al., 2023, p. 110; SIECUS, n.d.b, para 3). While marginalized identities often endure the "burdensome and exhausting task of negotiating whiteness" within predominantly white spaces, SIECUS agitates these systems of power with equity frameworks to ground in a mutual goal for changing human sexuality that is led by people from diverse backgrounds (Williams, 2022, p. 160).
Its advocacy also confronts external threats of privilege and oppression. Recent reports note that "of more than 650 state level bills on the topic, nearly one quarter sought to pare back or remove access," including "curricula inclusive toward LGBTQIA+ students (Finkel, 2025, para. 4). Such legislation illustrates how racialized and sexualized power structures reproduce inequity in schools, as well as how SIECUS led intersectional collectives and public education challenge systems of privilege and advance PROP principles as a core process to its work. SIECUS understands in its own rhetoric that PROP operates as a theoretical framework that necessitates practical and ethical incorporation into SIECUS practices and leadership.
Building Sustainable Systems: Strategic Planning and Leadership at SIECUS
Drawn from the Center for Organizational Design Transformation Model (n.d.), the structural resilience and sustainability of SIECUS is attached to its environment, strategy, and core processes. Operating in a politically polarized landscape, SIECUS maintains coherence by synchronizing strategies of policy reform, coalition building, and legislative monitoring with internal processes of education dissemination and evaluation. Their capacity to adapt while maintaining moral direction demonstrates a disciplined balance between creativity and accountability when planning efforts. If business planning is both a process and product, SIECUS embodies this through iterative agenda setting, resource allocation, and evaluation strategies that ensure innovation and fidelity to its mission (Social Enterprise Alliance, 2010). While a budget "tells the story of the project in numbers," SIECUS translates its advocacy into quantifiable impact that clarifies with transparency the investments in policy initiatives, partnerships, and programs (SIECUS FY 2022 Federal Funding Overview, 2022). These practices portray a social enterprise model grounded in ethical facilitation of programming, measurable outcomes of interventions, and sustainable systems to endure and invoke change.
Empathy as Strategy: Human Centered Design Thinking Within SIECUS
Human centered design is a "process that starts with the people you're designing for and ends with the solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs," and SIECUS enacts this through a participatory approach to policy innovation alongside strategic and core processes (Brown and Wyatt, 2010). In codesigning curriculums and legislative agendas with youth, educators, and reproductive justice organizations, SIECUS ensures that programs are shaped from embodied experiences rather than imposed mandates. (SIECUS, n.d.b). A feedback cycle generated through participatory research mirrors the inspiration, ideation, and implementation discussed by Brown and Wyatt (2010), and is brought to fruition by SIECUS's practice of advocacy as a continuous process of listening, testing, and refining with those it intends to serve.
From community participation stems collective creation that informs policy advocacy agendas core to SIECUS's principals. Evaluation of these policies leads to community feedback that is centered around equity, pleasure, and justice. If empathy can be operationalized as a planning tool that works in tandem with PROP's collective learning and sharing of power (Altaha et al., 2023), SIECUS's integration of human centered design reimagines sex education as a relational and iterative process of social change.
Conclusion: Program Planning into the Future of Leadership, Justice, and Sex Ed.
Human centered design is a planning method and direction for leadership and social transformation demonstrated by Sex Ed for Social Change through structuring advocacy and programming around collective participation and empathetic engagement. With innovation being something that begins through understanding lived experiences (Brown and Wyatt, 2010), SIECUS must start with learning from those most closely affected by policy. This approach concretizes communities as pillars for social change instead of passive recipients of programming. From Bolman and Deal's (2021) conception of leadership necessitating ethical creativity rooted in vision and guided by morals that recognize complexity, SIECUS leaders navigate the political resistance and cultural division in sex and health education discourse. Through adapting and maintaining transparency, the strategic intent of SIECUS and community stakeholders synergize into mutually committed objectives guided by social justice values.
At the broadest level, SIECUS positions the future of sexuality education and nonprofit leadership by integrating participatory designs and PROP principles in its own rhetoric. They maintain fiscal accountability that reframes sex education as a tool for equitable and collective social infrastructure. Instead of treating sexual health as something around which to solely develop programs, SIECUS situates it within a domain of human rights and community empowerment. Fusing empathy, innovation, and moral leadership demonstrates that the future of sex education and progressive organizations depends on the capacity to link radical dreaming with practical design that meets the needs of communities they serve. SIECUS embodies the transformative potential of program planning as an instrument of equity and enduring social change.
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