We are
a feminist education consulting practice.

Melissa is a renowned sexuality educator, best-selling author, and leading national voice for sex positive education. Her work has been featured in CNN, Huffington Post, Parents Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, BlackLove, and more.

Melissa is the founder of Sex Positive Families, an online platform that provides education and resources to families wishing to raise sexually healthy children. Since its inception in 2017, Sex Positive Families has grown its online communities, now impacting over 300,000 engaged followers and counting. They also serve thousands of tweens and families across the globe each year with their virtual gender-inclusive interactive puberty workshop and online course called Growing Into You!™.

As a Black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican licensed social worker with over 15 years in the field of sexual health, Melissa is known for their approachability and sense of humor that makes even the most uncomfortable conversations feel achievable.

Melissa has taught comprehensive sexuality education in schools, authored curricula, trained youth-serving professionals, and worked within HIV/AIDS case management and prevention at both nonprofit and state government levels. Her life’s mission continues to be rooted in the belief that all children deserve holistic, comprehensive, and shame-free sexuality education so they can live informed, empowered, and safer lives.

Alongside her professional experience, Melissa is most proud to be a parent raising three young people in a sex positive way. They are the constant inspiration for the work.

Bianca I Laureano is an award-winning educator, facilitator, curriculum writer, and sexologist. She is a founding member of the Women of Color Sexual Health Network (WOCSHN) and The LatiNegrxs Project. Her most recent project is ANTE UP! a virtual freedom school for justice workers offering professional development and certification we need for doing the work during these challenging times. Bianca earned her BA in Individual Studies with a focus on Latina Sexualities in 2000 from the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned a Masters of Arts from NYU in Human Sexuality Education in 2002 and a second Masters of Arts from the University of Maryland in Women’s Studies with a focus on sexualities, race, and racialization in 2006.  While at UM she was a CrISP Scholar at the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity and helped create the Intersectional Research Database. She has written several curricula that focus on communities of color: What’s the REAL DEAL about Love and Solidarity? (2015) and Communication MixTape: Speak On It Vol 1. (2017) and wrote the sexual and reproductive justice discussion guide for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene published in 2018.  Bianca led the curriculum development for the Netflix film Crip Camp which is rooted in disability justice principles available at www.CripCamp.com/curriculum. Bianca has been on the board of CLAGS, the LGBTQ Center at CUNY, The Black Girl Project, and SisterSong. She currently resides in Oakland, CA with her core partner G and is an AASECT certified sexuality educator and supervisor. Bianca was awarded an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies in May 2020. Find out more about Bianca at her website BiancaLaureano.com and about ANTE UP! at www.AnteUpPD.com

Dr. Karishma Desai’s interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and professional engagements employ anthropological and feminist lenses in the study of childhood/youth, gender, and education. Her central concerns gravitate around the politics of knowledge and being and attend to how gendered and racialized differences are stabilized and unsettled. She examines the contested ways in which global norms about gender and childhood/youth are consolidated, translated, and negotiated in educational sites predominantly in South Asia and the United States. Attending to global discourses alongside the everyday embodied and relational cultural lives of young people within unequal educational contexts, she investigates the kinds of gendered subjectivities that are forwarded as desirable with particular attention to the values, aspirations, and affective orientations made available. In doing so, she is interested in onto-epistemic questions related to sites of figuring and educating young people. She asks: what knowledges and ontologies matter in constructions of gendered childhoods? How have they come to matter and how are they disrupted? As a scholar and educator, she is invested in attending to educational problems by foregrounding the construction of youth, their complex material lives, subjugated knowledges, and modes of being that might offer new possibilities. These questions and investments result in the study of coloniality within educational sites and feminist scholarship that decenters liberal, anthropocentric constructions of the human. Dr. Desai’s research and teaching commitments build on over 15 years of experience as a classroom teacher and instructional leader in New York City and Chicago, as well as her work with educators and curriculum design in the United States, South Asia, and East Africa for over fifteen years.

Rachel Mewes is a curriculum designer and educator, whose areas of interest lie in sexuality and social justice education.  They hold a Masters in Curriculum and Teaching and a Sexuality, Women and Gender Certificate from Teachers College of Columbia University. Their interest in sexuality education has been informed by their work in the prevention of sexual and intimate partner violence at the Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness and Sexual Violence Response at Columbia University. They have also written for Go Ask Alice!, using research to answer questions on sexuality, gender, and sexual health. For their Masters Project, Rachel created a curriculum titled Queering Normalcy that draws on Critical Sexuality Studies and Queer Theory to expand our conceptions of what sexuality education can do through lessons that explore nuance, intersectionality, agency, and power.

Rachel has facilitated a diverse range of programming for youth and adult audiences and designed curriculum for a range of groups including companies, schools, museums, and nonprofits.  They are committed to innovative pedagogy that centers student knowledge and actively challenges injustice and oppression. They are interested in how curriculum can de-normalize our present conditions and serve as a portal to the world we want to see.

Connor (he/him) is a sexual health educator with Children’s Aid. As a former survivor advocate and community educator at The SAFE Alliance, Connor has nurtured a steadfast commitment to consent-affirming sex education and violence prevention curricula. His direct service background has contributed to an educational approach that recognizes lived experience as valuable knowledge and respects student agency. While Connor earned his Master’s in Curriculum & Teaching from Teachers College he collaborated with faculty and other sex educators to design and facilitate age-appropriate sex education for upper elementary students, and also developed a guide that empowers young children to learn about their boundaries and bodily autonomy. Connor holds a BSA in Neuroscience from The University of Texas at Austin, where he focused on the intersection of the socialization of masculinity and sexual violence prevention.

Connor welcomes opportunities to engage men in honest conversations about performing expectations of masculinity, unlearning lessons that undercut healthy relationships, and actionable ways to dismantle power-based violence. Throughout his work across age ranges (K-college) and educational contexts, Connor has witnessed the transformative power of people embracing their own authenticity over gendered scripts, and strives to create a learning environment that fosters those moments of transformation. He has led conversations with students about consent, safer sex practices, sexual harassment, how to support a friend who’s experienced sexual assault, restorative justice, and other topics tailored to specific requests. He is excited to continue learning with students and folks of all ages who consistently enrich evolving conversations about sex education and violence prevention with honesty, curiosity, and unique insight.