Living for Tomorrow - Estonia

Organised by the Nordic Institute for Women's Studies and Gender Research (NIKK), this 3-year action and research project worked to build a gender-centred HIV prevention strategy in Estonia. From 1998 to 2000, Living for Tomorrow worked closely with young people at the AIDS Prevention Centre in Tallinn, Estonia to foster sexual health awareness and safer sexual behaviours among young people, with a focus on gender, youth perspectives, and active learning processes. The project has made available reports (in printed format and on the Internet) the outcomes and processes of its work, and disseminates leaflets and videos produced from young participants' perspectives. Overall aims of the project included:

• facilitating discussions of how gender traditions affect sexual risk behaviours among young people
• inspiring new sexual health initiatives that energise and enable youth-centred health awareness focussed on gender issues
• strengthening networking/co-operation and new cross-cultural discussions of sexual health and gender.

Main Communication Strategies
Living for Tomorrow's central strategy was organising a core team of collaborating researchers, educators/facilitators, and young people. Throughout the duration of the project, developing collaborative links was a high priority - especially with Lithuania, Russia, England, and the Nordic countries, but also with other European countries. Joint articles, research exchanges, and the development of an advisory group were the bases for the project's international co-operation.

Collaborators used a questionnaire to explore what young people identify as some of the influential cultural narratives and beliefs framing gender-related attitudes, beliefs, and conventions around sexual behaviours. By critically examining the gender scripts and images of sexual behaviour in popular written, verbal, or visual texts, the research project also intended to facilitate discussion about how preventive sexual health education can engage more dynamically with youth attitudes and the traditionally gendered mapping of sex.

Specifically, in 1998 people from gender research, sexual health, and education participated in capacity building training sessions to explore new methods for approaching gender-focussed sexual safety with young people. In spring 1999, this core group in turn organised 8 weeklong sexual health workshops with 25 teenagers from Estonian and Russian families in Tallinn. The workshops were designed to facilitate active participation and a 2-way learning process. During the third phase of the project (spring 1999 - winter 2000), the teenagers began to produce sexual health information materials. In addition, data was collected from Nordic and Baltic countries on teen attitudes about men, women and sex, which informed the project while it was underway and provided material for project publications and comparative analyses.

The project produced a number of materials based on the research process. A video was produced that showed the processes of the capacity building training. Other materials include a practical workshop guide for actively taking up gender in HIV and sexual safety education, and a booklet in English, Russian, and Estonian made by teenagers for teenagers. Information about these and other materials is available on the Living for Tomorrow website. The website also reports on issues raised by the questionnaire data, the final project report ("Challenging Gender Issues"), and the project work processes and strategies.

In 1999, the core group of the Living for Tomorrow project in Tallinn decided to found their own NGO. This NGO bases its prevention and sexual education work on the gender-sensitive and participatory methods that informed the project. The group acquired funding from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to train a new cohort of teenage volunteers. The NGO is running workshops after Russian theatre performances, and the teenagers are taking the booklet they created into discussions in schools. Members of the NGO have presented their work in Norway, UK, Sweden, Latvia, and Finland. The young members of the NGO have proposed production of a quarterly newsletter on sexual and gender issues, in Estonian and Russian, for distribution in schools.