SEX ED PROGRAM LOSES GRANT, IS FORCED TO CLOSE

Denver-based Colorado Youth Matter to close after Trump administration ends main grant early

Colorado Youth Matter, a Denver-based program that helps school districts with sex education and works to prevent teen pregnancy, is closing after the Trump administration canceled a grant that had been set to run through 2020.

A Denver-based program that helps school districts with sex education and works to prevent teen pregnancy is closing, after the Trump administration ended its main grant early.

Colorado Youth Matter received 75 percent of its funding from the federal grant, about $750,000 per year. The grant had been scheduled to run through 2020, but the Trump administration ended the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants as of next summer for all of the 84 organizations around the country that received them. The administration cited concerns about whether the programs were effective, a rationale critics have questioned.

Regardless, without its main source of money, Colorado Youth Matter would have struggled to make its budget work, said Andrea Miller, the group’s executive director. Another private foundation also ended its grant with Colorado Youth Matter after the Trump administration announcement, worried that the organization would be too diminished without the federal money, Miller said.

“It would be difficult to regain some of that ground,” she said.

Colorado Youth Matter works with schools in Denver and Aurora, as well as with a program at Children’s Hospital Colorado, to teach broad-based sex education. That means it provides information about both abstinence and birth control, while also teaching teens about sexually transmitted infections, healthy relationships and consent, among other topics.

Last fiscal year, the organization trained more than 350 teachers and school health staffers and its curriculum reached about 1,300 students. Miller planned to expand its reach in the coming years.

The organization had hoped to find new grants, donations or other funding sources to help keep it afloat, to no avail.

So, instead, Miller said the group’s board made the decision to close at the end of the year. Over the next months, Colorado Youth Matter will work with schools and foundations to create sustainable sex education programs that can outlive the organization.

“We remain steadfast in our vision that all young people in Colorado deserve education and resources to make informed decisions about their sexual health,” she wrote in a letter to supporters announcing the closure. “We know that other very worthy organizations across our state will carry that vision work forward.”

Over the past decade, Colorado has been a national model for how to reduce the teen pregnancy rate. Between 2009, when the state launched the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, and 2014, the teen pregnancy rate and teen abortion rate both dropped by roughly 50 percent. A report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looking at declines in teen birth rates between 2007 and 2015, found that Colorado ranked fifth nationally for the reduction in urban counties and second nationally for the reduction in rural counties.