Laying the groundwork for pro-life leaders
America’s largest pro-life youth organization recently initiated a program to help Christian students in high school plug into the pro-life movement and move into leadership roles.
Lauren Castillo is national director of the newly launched Faith Foundations – a project of Students for Life of America (SLA). Castillo says they’ve found it is especially difficult to establish pro-life clubs in faith-based high schools because of a lack of time and resources – or because administrators believe such groups are too political.
“And so Faith Foundations is really providing the answer with the free resources, with the free trainings from our field team across the country, and giving the advisors a guidebook to know how they reach their pro-life students in an effective way to get them plugged into the movement,” she tells OneNewsNow.
Castillo explains that after identifying those students who are motivated to get involved, the next step is to get them to “meaningfully reach their peers with the reality of abortion [and] its life-affirming alternatives, and [to] connect them with local pro-life resources like a pregnancy resource center.”
But while many high schoolers are enthusiastic about being pro-life, Castillo says they often don’t have solid intellectual foundations to fully understand the movement.
“If they get involved in high school, they’re learning the deep, philosophical meaning to why they are pro-life; they understand it from a human rights perspective. Now with Faith Foundations they’ll be able to understand if from a theological perspective.”
Two other groups – The Culture Project and Healing the Culture – have partnered with SLA as they launch new pro-life groups in faith-based high schools.
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