Native Youth Sexual Health Network

We are youth led, but value the support of our intergenerational circles of relatives to do our work. Some of our areas of work include HIV/AIDS awareness, culturally safe sex education, #landback advocacy, Midwifery and Birth Justice, as well as Two-Spirit/Gender and Sexuality Education. Our network spans Turtle Island, creating space to engage with everything and anything that we know to affect our bodies, minds and spirits.

We often refer to each of our areas of work as a fire, and different folks in our network tend to different fires. We have a central fire, which the core team maintains (we do things like keeping the website running, connecting youth leaders with mentors and supports, and stewarding bigger projects). The smaller fires represent different key areas of work which we are currently feeding and tending to (for example, the harm reduction fire is tended by folks throughout our nations, who dedicate their focus to gathering resources to sustain harm reduction fires and inviting relatives to collaborate on work). Sometimes, when our capacity or the interests of youth leaders shifts, a fire may go out — sometimes temporarily, and sometimes for a long time. We acknowledge that this is within the teachings of many of our nations. Fires do not necessarily exist to be sustained forever, and we honour that every fire in our network’s work is governed by the youth leading it. We also encourage youth leaders to light new fires and create projects in their areas of interest!

Access Info: We host a variety of events and gatherings throughout Turtle Island in partnership with various organizations.