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"Meet The Need": Day 45 of 50 | Teen Pregnancy Prevention with United Way and MPS

Listen: This post is a little different for this campaign, but hopefully you'll get something a little deeper out of it. Oftentimes during Meet The Need, the fact that the campaign consists of short-form audio pieces shapes the nature of the interviews I conduct. Because the length of the piece is short, sometimes I will restrict the scope of the conversation. In featuring 50 organizations in 50 days, this is a sacrifice that's not easy to make, but one that we've realized is necessary to get everything done.

During my interview with the United Way of Greater Milwaukee, as we got into a discussion of the collaborative work they're doing with Milwaukee Public Schools on teen pregnancy prevention, I quickly realized that the conversation would be difficult to compress into 90 seconds. Because I feel that conversation was one that is important to hear, I'm posting it unedited.

In this first chunk of the conversation, Nicole Angresano (Vice President of Community Impact at United Way of Greater Milwaukee), Kathleen Murphy (Health Services Coordinator for MPS), and Brett Fuller (Curriculum Specialist for Health, Physical Education, Safe and Drug-Free Schools for MPS) paint a picture of their collaboration:

Moving from the first part to the second, I ramblingly asked them a question that could be summarized as: "I think we can all agree that young people should not be having sex until they're ready -- how do you walk the line between working with the reality of what's happening and carrying a message that what's happening is not okay and needs to change?" I also mentioned the difficulty of working with problems that have both morale and ethical implications. My question has been edited out for the sake of brevity: