Who We Are, What We Believe

Founded in 1979 as the Alliance for Young Families by eleven Boston-area agencies seeking to improve teen parent services, the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy is the ONLY organization in Massachusetts dedicated to ensuring that state policies and programs effectively address the complex issues associated with teen pregnancy. The mission of the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy is to provide statewide leadership to prevent teenage pregnancy and meet the service needs of pregnant and parenting teens and their children through policy analysis, research, education, and advocacy. The Alliance works to ensure that Massachusetts’ youth have access to comprehensive pregnancy-prevention services and that pregnant and parenting teens and their children have the resources and support they need to thrive. Our means for achieving these outcomes are to educate, empower and support young people and the adults who work with them to become leaders on the issue of teen pregnancy prevention and the needs of young parents.

Key Achievements
For 25 years, the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy has advocated for funding and public policies that protect the civil rights of teenage parents and help them to gain access to services such as housing, childcare, education and parenting support that will enable them to become nurturing, capable parents and productive members of society.

Through the 1980s when the teen pregnancy rate was at its highest, the Alliance worked to develop solutions to the increase in homelessness among parenting teens and provided leadership through the Healthy Adolescent Project to address gaps in preventive health care for adolescents.

In the early to mid-1990s, the Alliance worked tirelessly to ensure that welfare reform packages effectively met the needs of pregnant and parenting teens. We have been instrumental in creating a network of support services specifically designed for these vulnerable families and continue to guard against funding cuts to these programs that would negatively impact the health and well-being of parenting teens and their children.

In 2002, the Alliance embarked on a bold effort to counteract the recent trend towards federal funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage (Advocacy and Activism/Teen Pregnancy Prevention/Issue Briefs/Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage). These programs have proven to be not only inadequate, but in fact detrimental to the health of sexually active youth and the majority of young people, who at some point in their lives, will grow into sexually active adults. With a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Alliance has taken a leadership role in promoting access to effective comprehensive sexuality education.

Core Values
We believe that investing in teen pregnancy prevention and services for young parents supports the development of healthy families and strengthens communities.

We believe that teen pregnancy prevention programs and programs for pregnant and parenting teens must be effective, comprehensive in approach and demonstrate respect for the rights and capabilities of adolescents.

We believe parents and caregivers are important sexuality educators of their children and that the involvement of community programs, schools and religious institutions can assist families in addressing the issue of teen pregnancy and the needs of parenting.

We believe young men and young women are equally responsible for making decisions about sexual activity, preventing pregnancy, and supporting and parenting children.

We believe policies are most effective when the people who are affected by those policies are involved in creating and changing them.

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Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy
105 Chauncy Street, 8th Floor, Boston, MA 02111
617.482.9122 Main, 617.482.9129 Fax