As my first semester with Lift Louisiana comes to a close, I am so happy to reflect on what I have done thus far and so excited when looking forward to my plans for next semester.
This semester, I launched the pilot of the #MyLASexEd campaign on Tulane’s campus. This involved a revamp of the campaign’s website, the creation of a social media toolkit for the campaign, the creation and hosting of a webinar about the campaign, as well as the story-collecting and data entry from the campaign launch proper. I was able to collect stories from students at Tulane, which will be used for future advocacy and lobbying for sex ed reform in Louisiana. It was so exciting to watch my hard work pay off and see the stories that students had to share with me about their sex ed experiences, both good and bad. This all made it very apparent that Lousiana can do better, and we need to keep fighting to ensure that they do, in fact, do better.
Next semester, the campaign will be focusing on two main components. First, we will be expanding the scope of the campaign on Tulane’s campus. We will move from simple story-collecting that we’ve been doing through our photo campaign to a full video campaign. The goal is to find groups of interested students from all over the country, both Louisiana and elsewhere, and have them sit down for small group discussions related to their sex ed experiences. These small groups will be videotaped, and we will use these video recordings for future advocacy purposes. The second component of the campaign moving into the next semester is spreading the campaign to other campuses. I hosted a webinar earlier in the semester to teach other students on other campuses about the campaign and am now working with students from LSU, LSU Shreveport and Loyola to launch the campaign there. I’m excited for this expansion so that we can both get students all over the state involved in important activism, as well as collect as many stories as possible.
My time at Lift so far has been so educational and I have truly enjoyed doing such important work to improve sex ed statewide. I look forward to expanding on this work next semester and seeing where this project can help take our advocacy.