Program
What mothers and daughters
learn together.
A mother sits with her daughter and they learn, together, how a girl's body actually works: the conversation many mothers never got to have themselves, because nobody taught them either. The Foundation has applied for federal funding to run an independent, five-year study of that program, to find out whether it does what families already believe it does.
Filed with the federal government as Rigorous Evaluation of a Parent-Involved Body-Literacy Program for Teen Pregnancy Prevention
What this is
Most health classes teach a girl what to avoid. Very few teach her how her own body actually works, cycle by cycle, and why. That gap runs in families: a mother who was never taught herself usually has only worry to hand down. An independent education company built a program to close it, around one deliberate choice: put the mother and the daughter in the same room, learning the same material at the same time, so the conversation keeps going after class ends, at the kitchen table.
Families already choose this program on their own, and schools already open their doors to it. What has never happened is an independent look at whether it does what families believe it does. That gap is the reason the Foundation applied for this grant.
The Foundation's job here is to hold the federal award. It would pay the curriculum developer to teach the program exactly as they designed it, and pay the university team to measure what happens.
A mother says yes to what she has seen with her own eyes.
There is no shortage of programs. What a parent usually cannot get is a look at the lesson before her daughter sits through it, a name and a face for the person teaching it, or a chair in the room while it happens. Without those three, no is the answer that keeps her daughter safe, and mothers give it. What is short is trust. This program hands her all three at once: she is in the room the whole time, learning the same material her daughter is learning, from someone she has met. That is what turns a careful no into a yes they arrive at together.
What the study measures
What the study is built to detect, first, is whether a mother and daughter grow closer and keep talking after the class is over. That is the change the program is actually designed to produce, so that is what the study is powered to catch. The teen pregnancy prevention outcome, the reason the federal program exists at all, rides along as a second, confirming measure. It appears on the survey pages and nowhere else.
The design is fixed before a single family enrolls, and registered publicly, which means the study can come back negative. A finding that the program doesn't move these outcomes would be a real result, and it would be reported as one. Nothing on this page is a prediction of what the study will find.
The program families experience
Two stages, years apart, joined by one rule: a mother and her daughter learn it side by side, in the same room, at the same time. The mother comes as a learner in her own right. Most mothers were never taught any of this either, so the material is often as new to her as it is to her daughter.
Before the first cycle arrives
The first stage meets a girl in her pre-teen years, while there is still time to get ahead of it. It walks through what is coming and why, so that when her first cycle arrives she recognizes it. She was told. She knows what it means. Her mother sits beside her for the whole thing, learning the same material at the same time.
Learning to read her own signs
The second stage meets the same girl years later, in her middle and later teens. It teaches her to notice what her own body is telling her and to write it down, week after week, until keeping that record is just something she does. Trained leaders run these sessions from a book and a leader kit, with a parent in the room throughout.
Three ways to take stage one
Stage one comes in three formats, and a family picks the one that fits its week. Stage two runs a single way: a book and a leader kit, taught by trained group leaders, with a parent in the room throughout.
At the kitchen table
Video lessons a family works through on its own schedule, with worksheets for the daughter and a separate set of pages written for her mother. Some families take a lesson a week. Some take a weekend. The pace belongs to them.
A room at a familiar place
A parish or a school licenses the video sessions and gathers mothers and daughters to watch them together, working from the same worksheets and the same parent pages. Familiar building, familiar faces, same material.
A live workshop
A certified facilitator teaches the material in person, and mothers and daughters stay seated together for all of it, start to finish.
Who teaches it, and what they teach from
Who is allowed to teach it
The founder of the program trains and certifies every facilitator personally, after more than a decade teaching this material and an award-recognized book on the subject. Certification takes three steps: the training, an observed practice session, and a final check at the end. A site runs with one or two certified facilitators and a trained alternate, so a week that goes sideways still leaves someone in the room who knows the material.
What a site actually gets
It arrives as a kit. Lesson plans written out session by session, a script the facilitator can follow, handouts for every girl in the room, a separate set written for her mother, and a checklist that keeps one session recognizably the same as the next. A facilitator in one parish and a facilitator three states away are teaching the same thing.
Where it happens
Sessions happen where these families already are: parishes, diocesan programs, and Catholic schools, and at kitchen tables, homeschooling families among them.
Reach so far
These are the developer's own counts, gathered over years of doing the work, long before a federal reviewer ever saw any of it. They say how many families have sat through the program. What it did for those families is a different question, and answering it is the entire reason for the study.
How those families took stage one
One regional faith partner has brought the program back again and again across more than a year, and is now training its own people to run it without help from outside. That is the quietest kind of endorsement there is.
What joining the study would mean
If federal reviewers fund the application, this is what a family would be agreeing to. None of it is underway. None of it is open, and nobody is being signed up.
Permission first, from both of them
Both would sign, on paper, before a single question is asked. A daughter's yes counts on its own, separately from her mother's, and a girl who does not want to take part would not have to.
Three sittings, spread over years
A family would fill out the same kind of survey three times: at the start, again around nine to twelve months in, and once more a year or two after that. The questions ask how close the mother and daughter feel, how easily they talk to each other, and how much the daughter understands about what her own body is doing.
What the surveys would ask
Whether a teenager waits longer to make certain relationship decisions is the outcome the federal program exists to measure, so the surveys would ask about it. The asking would happen on paper, in private. The lesson in the room stays what it has always been: how a girl's body works, and why.
No family gives anything up
Some sites would be compared with others. A comparison site keeps running whatever program it already has, unchanged. A cleaner contrast is not worth taking something away from families who count on it.
Everyone in line gets a turn
One version of the design draws the order by lottery, with the sites further back joining later in the study. Under it, every site that signs on would have had the program before the study ends.
Written down before the answer is known
The design would be posted publicly before any results exist, so the target cannot quietly move afterward. The findings would be published whether they come back good, bad, or flat. A university ethics board would read the whole plan and sign off before anything begins.
How it would work
An independent curriculum developer
An independent education company writes the program and teaches it. The Foundation does neither. Facilitators are trained and certified by the developer, every session seats a mother and her daughter together, and sites come from communities the developer already serves: parishes, dioceses, and Catholic schools.
An independent evaluation team
Its lead evaluator and principal investigator is a professor of psychology at a major research university whose published work centers on women's health, and who had no part in writing the curriculum. The design is a matched-pair cluster study with a path to a randomized upgrade, carried out under the university's institutional review board, with three surveys: one at the start, one around nine to twelve months in, and one a year or two after that. The whole design is made public before anyone knows how it turns out.
Five budget periods, a small number of sites
If funded, this would run five years, one twelve-month period at a time, across somewhere between two and six sites, with more families joining each year until the last. Only the families who enroll in the study would take part.
Submitted, and waiting for an answer
The Foundation filed this application on July 23, 2026 with the Office of Population Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, under funding opportunity AH-TP2-26-001. It is in front of federal reviewers now. A decision is expected around the end of September 2026.
No award has been made. Nothing described on this page is funded, scheduled, or promised, and the Foundation is not enrolling families.
Questions
Reviewers, prospective partners, and journalists with questions about this application are welcome to write to the Foundation directly. Entity facts, verification links, and the 501(c)(3) determination are on the organizational facts page.