The awards process always highlights the incredible projects, inspiring people and hard work going on across the sector every day.
Elaine is a senior Pregnancy Options Advisor, committed to evidence based practice; trusting and empowering women to make the contraception and pregnancy choices best for them. The projects she
has initiated and run include a pregnancy options counselling service, a post-natal contraceptive service for women in vulnerable groups, a dedicated contraceptive planning service for under 18s and a ‘risk and resilience’ programme.
Tinu is a health care assistant at Wandsworth’s only walk-in GP practice. She has been instrumental in the roll out of their opportunistic POC HIV testing programme and HIV Testing Week in 2013; getting her practice on-board, involving the nurses, GPs and reception staff. Tinu is passionate about what she does, pushing boundaries and always believing in achieving more.
Lemar attended the award winning fatherhood programme at Oakhill Secure Training Centre, which includes the participation of visiting young parents in the delivery of some sessions. Lemar is now one such ‘expert by experience’, who passionately believes it is the responsibility of his generation to be the involved fathers and positive role models. He has a natural gift as a speaker, and communicates his experiences and views eloquently. He offers invaluable advice to young and expectant fathers, and young men at risk of becoming fathers.
Chandni Clinic is women-only, providing sexual health and contraceptive service to Asian Muslim women. This project focuses on the sexual health needs of a notoriously hard-to-reach group within the context of Islamic tenets, dispelling misconceptions about sexual health. Religious and cultural beliefs and taboos about sexual activity, among many other factors, make it extremely difficult to address this issue. Chandni Clinic aims to address all these barriers.
In 2004, PASH (Peer Activities in Sexual Health) volunteers began delivering peer-led sexual health information and education sessions within schools, colleges, informal youth settings and through community-based events. The project has trained and supported 90 young people to become PASH peer educators. Involvement in PASH not only supports young people’s learning within the sex and relationships education arena, it has also provided volunteers with a valuable springboard into the world of work and further education.
This partnership has worked to design and deliver a range of bespoke, interactive, specialist sex and relationship education (SRE) film resources for local schools and youth settings in Walsall. All the resources have been made by local young people in the community. The website www.easySRE.net is easily accessible, informative and provides engaging SRE education for young people and their parents/carers in Walsall.
BBC Casualty’s two-part storyline focused on female genital mutilation (FGM), broadcast in April 2013. FGM is a crime of child abuse, but there have never been any arrests and it is thought at least 24,000 children are under threat from FGM in UK every year. The episode, “Unsilenced” was a profoundly effective and affecting piece of television which took the difficult and often ‘silent’ subject matter into the front rooms of millions of people and had a huge impact in national press, social media and (crucially) with those it directly affected. Aware that the subject can be controversial and deemed to be culturally sensitive, the show and the episode’s writer were determined to tell the story with as much research and input from the communities it affected as possible.
Click below to watch a video clip:
This piece looks at how sexual abuse in schools happens, how the education profession is – and isn’t – supported in its efforts to prevent it happening, and examining the effects on children and their families. Tickle’s piece took an enormous amount of research, as well as delicate negotiations with people who had been through a lot of trauma, and is the piece she is most proud of having written in 12 years as a journalist.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was named Brook and FPA’s Parliamentarian of the year for her commitment to the improvement of sex and relationships education (SRE) in schools.
Click below to watch Yvette’s acceptance video:
Two lifetime achievement awards were also presented at the event, to Dilys Cossey OBE and Dr David Paintin who both tirelessly campaigned on birth control, abortion and reproduction rights ensuring that safe, legal abortion was available in the UK.
Dilys has been a leading campaigner for over 40 years at national and international levels on birth control, abortion and reproductive rights. Dilys was awarded an OBE in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Family Planning and Reproductive Health in 2000.
David qualified as a doctor in 1954 and fertility control has been the principal theme of their professional life. David joined the Abortion Law Reform Association and was one of the medical advisors who successfully campaigned for the Abortion Act of 1967. Photograph shows Simon Blake, Brook's Cheif Executive, reading Dr David Paintin's speech on the evening.