PPMW Profile: Aleia Mays

In college, Aleia Mays’ friend got pregnant. 

At a time when they needed support and acceptance from their peers, they were instead shunned from their program.

Aleia said earnestly, “I don't want anyone to ever feel like that because of a choice that they made. And also (she found herself) in that situation because she didn't have the knowledge that she needed.”

She retells this as a pivotal moment in her journey in sexual health education. A journey she is continuing as Education Manager at Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. “That was a turning point for me to really say, ‘Okay, so how could we have fixed that within [her experience], how could she have not been shamed?’ And I think the answer to that was comprehensive sexual health education,” Aleia said.

For Aleia, this moment was a key to recognizing the role that sexual education can play to absolve shame and stigma, and how education around sexual choices creates and builds power. While she’s had pivotal moments that piqued her interest in sexual education, she was interested in these issues since her high school sex education class. 

Aleia described her own sexual health education as solely relying on fear-based tactics and abstinence-only education. While she remembers enjoying the abstinence-only program, looking back now she acknowledges how incomprehensive, impractical and unfair the abstinence-only curriculum was. “I think that it's not fair to ask someone at the age of 18, to be abstinent for the rest of their life, because that's a lot of life and (at) 18 you don't really know who you are.”

Aleia’s journey is one rather paradoxical — that someone who spent a larger part of their adolescent years being taught fear-based sexual education would teach themselves but her story is also one of agency. “I think it's empowering, right? It gives you power over your body and what you want. I think that knowledge really makes it so that you can say no, in circumstances where you might not have been able to before because you didn't feel like you have power.”

Her interest only grew deeper after high school but not for the reasons one may initially think. In college, she attended a university where students were able to get tested for HIV but the school was not able to provide condoms or any other types of birth control.  While school administrators tacitly acknowledged that students were having sex, they “were not going to provide you any type of preventive care.” 

It’s these lapses in her own schooling and education that she uses to fuel her practice now. During her master's program, she reviewed the comprehensive sexual health curriculum that is implemented in Chicago public schools and saw how the school system was revamping its sexual health education programs. Seeing their approach to sexual education opened her eyes to the importance of comprehensive education for all youth. . Her strong interest in sexual health education also garnered her interest in other areas of public health more broadly such as diabetes, HIV, and infectious diseases.

In her first few months as a staff member at PPMW, every day is different.—from managing grants, meetings with partners, to education sessions, and meeting with community organizers and schools. While her daily responsibilities can vary, the intention is the same: to educate and empower young people to make empowering choices for themselves and their sexual health.

“We just want to educate (young people) so that they have the knowledge to make the best choice for themselves.”