Reaching Beyond the $800 million

By Elizabeth Spillman,
Development Coordinator, Standupgirl.com 

On September 6, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial praising the Health and Human Services Department for their decision to phase out the Obama administration’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. This program awarded grants for educational initiatives designed to prevent teen pregnancy. Over $800 million in grants have been disbursed through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program since 2010. However, when multiple studies showed that the initiatives that received grant funding were ineffective, HHS decided to divert funding from the program.

Eight hundred million is a lot of money, so you might be wondering how many teenagers were affected or reached through this funding. The answer is less than 1% of teenagers in America! There are between 20 and 30 million teenagers in America. This means the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program reached between 200,000 to 300,000 teens at a cost of between $2,600 and $4,000 per teenager, all for a program that had “no discernable effect.”

Only 200,000 to 300,000 youth were reached by this huge expenditure. There has to be more effective ways to reach teenagers in America than a failed government program. There are – and it is a program started 16 years ago right here in Oregon!

StandUpGirl.com reaches over 300,000 people in a single month, all for less than $10,000, with an abundance of information on pregnancy, fetal development, abstinence, and life-affirming support and resources. Since its inception 16 years ago, this website has touched over 38 million people – at an average cost of 4 cents per person. With the vast reach of social media applications, we have only touched the surface of how we can provide hope and courage to girls in crisis. There really is no way to tangibly measure how many lives have been touched by our vast community of women helping women that has grown out of the website. One thing is for certain, we know our ministry works! One need only look in our email inbox to see women who have been affected by the passionate and tireless work of our volunteers. The pictures of the babies that have been given a chance at life because of the work of StandUpGirl.com are on our office wall.

If we could name a price for the lives that have been changed forever through the work of StandUpGirl.com and the donors who provide the funds for our work, it would be PRICELESS.