Candor Health Education

Our goal is to increase access to high quality sexuality and substance abuse prevention education for young people. We aim to deliver high quality sexuality and drug prevention programming that meets youth, school and family expectations. Our main learning objectives are to increase knowledge and improve attitudes regarding sex education and drug prevention topics among youth and their parents.

-To increase knowledge and change attitudes regarding the risks of using alcohol, nicotine (vaping), marijuana, prescription drugs and other drugs.

-To increase knowledge of anatomy, reproductive health, understanding of healthy relationships and the consequences of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections as well as online safety

-To increase adult knowledge of risk and protective factors and help them to practice effective strategies that will support youth.

Candor Health Education is a non-profit that educates young people aged 10-14, parents/guardians and communities on the topics of drug and sex education. We provide science-based information in a safe, engaging environment so students gain age-appropriate knowledge and are empowered to make informed decisions about their health. As health education experts, we partner with public and private schools to bring accurate and up-to-date health education programs that compliment existing health and social and emotional learning curricula. We support schools with student learning data and provide supplemental teaching resources and parent links so they can keep the conversation going.

We have free online educational materials to increase access to high quality resources for schools and communities. We have partnered with graphic designers to create engaging videos to help adults and young people learn and discuss emerging topics like sexting, explicit content and social media use: https://candorhealthed.org/sex-and-technology-portal/

We also have a substance abuse prevention education portal with engaging videos, 8-pixel video game, and interactive graphic novels covering commonly used drugs like marijuana, alcohol, prescription pills.
https://candorhealthed.org/substance-abuse-prevention-portal/

We are the largest provider of school-based health education in Chicagoland delivering programs to over 85,000 students at 673 schools during the 2022-23 school year. We have thirteen professional health educators from diverse backgrounds and all undergo a rigorous training and monitoring regimen to guarantee that they deliver our curriculum with high fidelity and are able to answer a wide range of student questions. We constantly update our scenario based story-telling and drug facts, etc. to ensure that we are relevant and meet state and national sexuality education, social emotional learning and prevention education standards and best practices. We measure outcomes with pre- and post-tests and adjust based on teacher and student feedback surveys.

Founded as Robert Crown Center for Health Education in 1974, we have educated more than six million Chicago area youth to date. We recently updated our substance abuse prevention programs and are nearly complete with an overhaul of our sexuality education continuum so we can better serve the needs of youth and families with a learning management system and more interactive and effective story-based curriculum.

In 2020 we rebranded the organization as Candor Health Education. At this time we closed our Center and pivoted to provide blended learning and traveling to schools rather than have students bussed in to our location. During the COVID pandemic we ramped up fully virtual programming and we have maintained that option as we expand our reach beyond northern Illinois. We are currently working to reach more students with our full continuum of programs spanning 4th - 8th grade so they receive reinforced learning and skill building opportunities.

We are serving schools in Illinois, Indiana, New York and Wisconsin. We can partner with more schools to reach any English speaking youth audience now that we have proven our curriculum results are the same whether delivered in-person, or fully online.