IMPACT! abstinence education
the PREVENTION arm of PASS:: A Network of Life Affirming Care

In 1988, PASS began the IMPACT! abstinence education program in response to requests from teachers in our local public schools. They observed that after sex education programming was delivered in their schools, students were becoming more and more sexually active, at younger and younger ages.  They saw bright, happy teenagers become depressed, distracted, and their grades dropping. Teenage girls were getting pregnant, and dropping out of school. 

They asked PASS to come and make students aware that contraception did not erase the negative aftermath of sexual activity, and real people, students just like them, were at PASS trying to put the pieces of their lives back together again.

These teachers were among the first to identify one of the greatest threats to society, which have come into sharper focus over this last 19 years… recent studies have proven that so-called ‘safe-sex’ programs actually INCREASED the teen birthrates by 47% with condom use among their student participants!

By 1995, there were 1,000,000 teenagers a year getting pregnant. One in three of these teenagers dropped out of school…and 80% of poverty in the United States was attributed to teen pregnancy. In 2002, it became clear that teenagers are much more likely to become depressed and to try to commit suicide after becoming sexually active.

Today, teenager contracts a full 25% of all sexually transmitted infections, including HPV, Herpes, and HIV. Each of these carries the risk of death to the teen or to children born to the teen. In our communities alone, 50,000 teenagers will get a STD this year.

IMPACT! returns to 41 high schools, 21 junior high’s, and delivers the highest standard in prevention programming to just under 17,000 young people annually. . . and they are making a significant difference!

A new federal government study shows the teen birth rate has dropped to 21 per 1000 from 39 per 1000, and that an overall drop in teens having sex has caused a reduction in: teen pregnancy, AND teen abortions. In fact, teen births have declined in Illinois by 38% between 1991 and 2004, which means that not only are teen lives being spared, but Illinois taxpayers ARE SAVING  $346 Million a year as a direct result of the increase in abstinence until marriage programming!

Ministry Challenge:

How many of you have kids, or know kids, or work with kids that have gone through a high school in our area – any high school in our area – since 1988?

EACH one of those has been presented to by PASS on the virtues of Abstinence Till Marriage.. over 150,000 in all!

But … here are the challenges that the program faces:

Our federally supported funding got cut – totally – the $80,000 per year that is needed to present this program is gone.

In addition - we need to invest in recruiting more volunteers -  and raise up a new generation of “truth teachers”

And we think most important to this ministry: Our kids need to be reached earlier and more often.  Here’s the reality – it’s not your father’s Oldsmobile anymore!... kids are growing up quicker and being messaged too by a world that is telling them – at a very early age – that sex outside of marriage is ok.  This message is being barraged to our kids and their friends relentlessly by mainstream entertainment – television, music and the internet -  (the average age a child is exposed to pornography is now 11) so we are battling time and messaging muscle!

And lastly – but just as important: Our kids parents need to be reached… they, for the most part have no clue… and are in many cases counter-consulting us by advocating “safe sex” if “abstinence” fails.

So how do we tackle those challenges?

Together!  Together we can raise the resources by participating in Project Legacy and then by recruiting others into our ministry… so together we can expand the programs and build the technology that meets our market (the kids) where they are at (check out our IMPACT sites!!) which takes capacity and capital… that’s where our partners come in!

That’s where our legacy lingers… in the deep recesses of the new digital world the next generation will live.

Project Legacy is about starting a work that will build on this important ministry, establishing an infrastructure and capacity that will take us through not only the next 25 years but for many more years beyond.