Health Leadership Apprentice Program coordinator Landon A. Hackley authored the following post.
Mallory Culbert has been an advocate for sex education for queer people for quite some time. After recognizing how poorly her high school handled sex education in general, she decided she would make a difference, especially for people in the LGBTQ communities. When she got to Austin and joined the Health Leadership Apprentice Program, she did just that.
Culbert said she wants to “fill in the gaps that our parents never told us” when it comes to sex education for queer people. “Growing up in the south and growing up queer,” she said, “your parents are not going to tell you anything.”
She recognized that issue early on, so it was her initial pursuit once she joined the HLA Program in spring 2018. Culbert said the HLA Program was instrumental in helping her get her idea off the ground: “I had the idea for almost three years, but I never did anything about it until I joined the HLA Program.”
Through the HLA Program, Culbert plugged into the Kind Clinic and worked in the Austin location for some time, but she eventually branched out on her own as her idea blossomed. She took what she learned from the Kind Clinic and put her own spin on it: Her first thought was to start an educational video series, but she ultimately decided on creating a blog, she said, so people could “go back and look at the information instead of searching for a topic in a video.”
“It makes it more accessible to people and prevents people from having to speed the video up and skim through it,” she explained.
Culbert’s goal is to “fill gaps in knowledge that lead to disparities in sexual health.” She created Tumblr blog called What Our Parents Never Told Us that she said “focuses on harm reduction in sex and drug use, since sex and drug use is often conflated in the queer community.” Her blog is an inclusive community that allows other people to contribute to the knowledge through posts, so more information can be accumulated for people to use. Since her start, Culbert said, “the idea has gone farther than the original video idea, for sure.”
However, Culbert is just getting started. She said the blog is not fully off the ground, but she has high hopes for the future. She wants to build a sex education curriculum for local school districts through the implementation of independent educators. She believes that working on the ground through grassroots initiatives will help her reach her goal much quicker than the traditional route.
Outside of her sex education project, Culbert is working to become an OB-GYN or a surgeon. Not only is she passionate about both areas of medicine, but she also plans to use her success to fund sex education initiatives in the future. She is a member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and Students for Planned Parenthood, and she volunteers at Austin Harm Reduction Coalition and Mama Sana Vibrant Woman. Culbert said her volunteer work is what inspired her to become an OB-GYN.
After graduating, Culbert plans to join the Peace Corps so she can serve, travel the world and hone her Spanish-speaking abilities — she hopes to work in Latin America one day. When she’s not working, Culbert loves playing ukulele and roller skating.
If you are interested in Culbert’s program, reach out to an HLA program coordinator (Landon Hackley or Kelsey Mumford) to learn more.