Location: Oakland, CA, USA with independently registered GOJoven Alumni Associations in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico

Mission: GOJoven’s mission is to develop and support young leaders and their organizations to advance health and wellness, education, sustainable development, and civic participation across the globe.

Focus Areas: Advocacy, Civic Engagement, Community Development, Education, Health

Program Overview:

• GoJoven believes youth leadership is important because young people are integral to influencing policies, programs, and services for youth at the community, national, and global level.
• GOJoven promotes and supports the development of young leaders to act as catalysts for social change who vastly expand Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) choices, services, policies, and programs at the community, national, and regional levels. A key focus of GOJoven is to decrease the adolescent fertility rate among girls aged 15-19 by enhancing ASRH programs, policies, and services through training youth leaders and young service providers.
• GoJoven strengthens the enabling environment to support youth leadership and ASRH by providing capacity building and funding to organizations to enhance their work in ASRH.
• In GOJoven, young leaders working in ASRH participate in skills training in leadership development, advocacy, civic engagement, program design and grant writing, and other professional skills. They design leadership action plans with a focus on community development to improve ASRH, and then implement them over a two year period.
• At GoJoven, leadership means active partnership and power-sharing with young people engaged in the program, so that youth are partners, not just recipients. GOJoven’s approach connects professional development opportunities (equipping young leaders with tangible skills) with opportunities for ownership (planning and implementing an action plan) that allow aspiring young people the chance to learn, practice, and achieve.

Impacts:

• GOJoven International, which develops the leadership skills and commitment of young people in ASRH issues, has graduated 240 young leaders to date.
• GOJoven has provided seed grants ($3000) to over 45 SRH focused organizations, primarily those that employ GOJoven Fellows, for organizational strengthening work, and has engaged more than 350 organizations in institutional strengthening workshops.
• Each GOJoven country program directly touches around 1,000 youth per year through service providers, education, and/or youth directly trained in shorter trainings.
• Every year, an estimated 5,000-10,000 youth in each program country are indirectly reached through ASRH network outreach, such as via health fairs, presentations at schools, presentations to communities, media, and communications (e.g. radio programming).
• To date, GOJoven International has reached over 50,000 youth across the four countries with direct ASRH education and information.
• External evaluations show that GOJoven has had positive impact at the individual, organizational, and community levels.

Learn More: www.gojoven.org