Where Things Stand, and How You Can Help Us This Giving Tuesday
This has been a year of big changes for the work we do, and this week brought more.
The election: Iowans elected a new governor, a new U.S. senator and new members of Congress. The state legislature, which writes the laws that shape sex education in Iowa schools, will keep the same majority. New leaders won’t take office until January, and much is still unknown. What we do know is that the work of supporting young people doesn’t pause between elections.
The federal cuts: In late June, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services canceled 53 of the 66 grants in the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program, about $68 million in total. EyesOpenIowa’s grant was one of them. Congress created TPP in 2010 to fund medically accurate, age-appropriate programs with proven results, and it has had bipartisan support ever since.
Our Executive Director, Kristin Fairholm, spoke with NPR twice this fall about what the cuts meant here. We had spent months recruiting parents and teens for our programs, and then we had to cancel them. “It’s been disheartening for us to have to tear everything down,” she said. The lost grant made up about a quarter of our budget.
In August, a federal judge temporarily blocked HHS from requiring future TPP grants to focus on abstinence, and the lawsuit is ongoing. In October, NPR reported that $86 million Congress set aside for TPP went to a single consulting firm on the last day of the fiscal year, a decision that is also being challenged. The federal government is running on temporary funding through December 11, and the program’s future is still being decided.
Through all of it, young people still have the same questions, the same needs and the same right to understand their bodies.
We’re not waiting on Washington. For more than 30 years, EyesOpenIowa has adapted to make sure Iowa’s young people get honest, accurate information, and we’re doing it again. We’re growing our trainings for educators and families, building new resources like Growing Sideways and our upcoming series for parents of boys, and leaning on the community that has always carried this work.
That community is you. If you’ve given, shared our work or shown up to a training, thank you. In a year with so much uncertainty, the most powerful thing any of us can do is stay connected: speaking up, listening first, choosing kindness and inspiring others to do the same.
Mark your calendar: Giving Tuesday is Tuesday, December 1.
Ready to give now? A gift of $25, $50, $100, or whatever you can helps us train educators, equip parents and make sure every Iowa teen has someone they can ask. Monthly gifts go even further, giving us steady support we can plan around all year.
Listen and read:
Additional sources: K-12 Dive, “Trump administration targets teen pregnancy prevention grants,” 2026; Education Week, “Court Blocks Trump Admin.’s Abstinence Emphasis in Teen Pregnancy Program,” August 2026; Congressional Research Service, “Status of FY2027 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations,” September 2026.