We describe ourselves as peer educators and our main focus is sexual education and counseling for teenagers on issues of puberty, contraception and reproductive health.

Sex education in schools
We visit middle and secondary schools to teach about contraception and STIs. We also talk about relationships, responsibility of partners, assertiveness and patients' rights. Unfortunately, we don't have enough time to cover all important topics, for example violence, since we are limited by school schedules and our classes take place instead of other subjects, if teachers are kind enough to grant us an hour or two.

Our experience has shown that students are interested in what we talk about, they listen carefully and ask many questions. We try to facilitate conversations on difficult topics and provide information absent in teenagers' magazines. Many students and school principals have thanked us and invited our group to return and expand the programme.

Online counselling
Another activity of PONTON is e-mail counseling. The letters we receive show that young people are often helpless due to the lack of information. Girls write about unwanted pregnancies or violence – things we can't do much about because they already happened. If teenagers had access to reliable sexual education in schools, many personal tragedies could have been avoided.
For over a year we have been running a web discussion forum where our volunteers have answered thousands of questions.

Phone hotline
So far we have organized two summer hotlines for mobile phone users. This summer we received over 1000 text messages during just two months. From September to June we run a hotline for teenagers every Friday between 4 and 8 p.m.

Street actions
Ponton volunteers have been advocating for comprehensive and neutral sex education in Poland and providingf basic HIV and unwanted pregnancy prevention information, along with condoms and brochures, on the streets of Warsaw.

Conferences
Representatives of the Ponton group have atended and spoken at many conferences and workshops of reproductive rights and sex education. We were one of the patrons of the first World Contraception Day celebrations in Poland.

Nominations
Two of the group's founders, Aleksandra Józefowska and Anka Grzywacz, have been nominated for the Polish Woman of the Year award of the popular women's magazine "Wysokie Obcasy", in 2006 and 2007 respectively. This year the Ponton Group has received a nomination of the Dutch foundation Mama Cash for the award "she changes the world".

To contact us call: +48 22 635 93 95, +48 22 887 81 40 [ask for Ola]

or e-mail at: info@ponton.org.pl

More about us in English in the report published by Catholics for a Free Choice here

Listen and read pieces on sex education from the English Section of the Polish public radio. Ponton group volunteer Anka Grzywacz talks about and the Ponton group here and here.

Read an article about sex education and teenage pregnancies in Poland with comments from Ponton sex educator Anka Grzywacz.