(©2016/CHSI/Nilo Yacat)
File name: U4U Caselyn Batasan.jpg
September 2016, Quezon City — Height does not matter.
Just ask Caselyn Briguera, 19, of Quezon City. Caselyn has learned to shrug off jokes about her height. “Sanay na po ako (I am used to it.),” she says.
Standing at four feet and 11 inches, she gets easily dwarfed in a crowd of teenagers. But when she takes on the microphone to give instructions to other taller teenagers, Caselyn stands tall and proud as a youth leader of an urban poor community.
Caselyn is one of the leaders of the city’s Task Force on Youth Development (TFYD). She hails from Barangay Batasan in District II, Quezon City where she takes on the role of the Big Sister of over 60 youth organizations.
It is a role she has taken to heart. “I have attended many leadership seminars,” recounts Caselyn. But she holds her experience at the U4U Teen Trail as one of the most memorable and insightful.
In December 2015, along with 24 other youth leaders in Barangay Batasan, Caselyn joined a workshop on how to facilitate a U4U Teen Trail event. U4U is an entertainment-education (enter-educate) learning package that provides young Filipinos with critical information to help them prevent teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STI). One component of U4U is an interactive health education caravan that has been set up in over 300 schools and communities since 2014, reaching directly over 60,000 young Filipinos.
“Sa maigsing panahon, natutunan namin kung paano talaga maka-connect sa ibang mga teenagers (In such a short time, we really learned how to connect with other teenagers),” shares Caselyn. The workshop prepared Caselyn and her peers to manage the U4U Teen Trail where almost 200 other teenagers from Barangay Batasan were treated to a fun-filled day of workshops, games, and songs about puberty, romance, and sexuality.
The U4U Teen Trail is the primary vehicle of the Commission on Population (POPCOM) to promote key messages on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health (ASRH). Designed by a non-government organization (NGO) named the Center for Health Solutions and Innovations Philippines, Inc. (CHSI), U4U was awarded as the most outstanding communications program on social good by the Public Relations Society of the Philippines (PRSP) in 2015.
Through an agreement with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), U4U was designed, tested, and scaled up with funding support from the Government of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (AusAID-DFAT).
After the U4U event, Caselyn and other teen facilitators have started holding mini-U4U sessions at the barangay health center. They talk about puberty, gender, sexual identity and prevention of earl pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. The Batasan team has also helped other QC barangays in facilitating U4U Teen Trail events.
“When I saw U4U, I knew that it could help us drive our adolescent health and development program forward,” says Dr. Letty de Guzman, AHD coordinator of Quezon City. Dr. de Guzman joined another advocacy workshop on how to design and implement an integrated ASRH program.
In this workshop, CHSI recommended the use of U4U to promote teen-friendly services in the community. This is part of a framework called SPHERE. SPHERE stands for School-Peers-Health-Engagement-Research-Employment. These components refer to various local settings where young people may be reached with ASRH information and services. Currently introduced in nine local government units, the SPHERE framework has allowed duty-holders working for young people to envision an integrated and strategic way of working together.
To further bolster the capacity of the QC teen facilitators, CHSI organized a follow-up workshop on peer education called “peerKADA.” This workshop aims to equip youth leaders with the skills and tools to talk to their peers and build relationships through a peer approach.
“Marami talagang hugot ang mga kabataan. Sa peerKADA ay natuto kaming magtanong nang tama para mapag-usapan ang mga hugot na ito (Young people experience a lot. At the peerKADA workshop, we learned how to ask the right questions so we can talk about these experiences),” says Makoi Caber, 17, another youth leader from Barangay Batasan.
“Pagdating sa peer education, hindi mahalaga kung mayaman, maganda o matangkad. Mas importante na makilala kami bilang mga kaibigan (When it comes to peer education, it is not important if you are rich, pretty or tall. It is more important to be known and referred to as a friend),” stresses Caselyn. Good friends, after all, are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to forget. To Caselyn and Makoi, that’s what matters when working with peers.
