our blog

Words Mean Things. Specific things.

Just a brief request from us to the world-at-large, primarily with the aim of making our users lives a little easier. Secondarily, it'd also make the lives of those of us who work to help them daily in these areas easier, too, which would sure be nice.

Please do us and everyone else a favor and stop using certain words with very specific meanings as general shorthand.

From a Strike to a Home Run: A Thank You (and also a nudge, but just a little one)

Today, like most days, our site has been up and running, including its tremendous archive; probably serving around 20,000 users by the end of the day. All of our direct services are live: our message boards, SMS service and live online chat. Myself and some of the volunteers are in the middle of creating new content, like one of our in-depth articles or advice columns. The daily and collective creative brainstorming, problem-solving, observing and reflecting that goes on behind the scenes amongst our staff and volunteers, and together with our users, can and will happen today.

This is dedicated to...

Thanks so much to everyone who has been pitching in with our current fundraising drive. We're getting awfully close to our goal -- to the minimum we need to raise to avoid any shutdowns -- and we could not be more appreciative and excited. Thank you!

Connecting with WOC and Sexuality

Sexuality in ColorEver since puberty, I found my body to be a site of shame, something I desperately wanted to escape.

A transplant to predominantly white Catholic schools on Long Island, I was immediately deemed ugly. I had an older sister, but we were close enough in age that we were navigating puberty around the same time. As second-generation daughters of immigrant parents, we were on our own as far as navigating the personal and social meanings of our bodies.

A couple quickies (not the fun kind)

Just posting to make a quick addition to this post to clarify a couple important things.

While people are being mostly incredibly supportive of us right now -- and we can't thank you enough, but will do our best to try in another post soon where we can talk about nothing but how awesome some of you are -- we've seen a few comments out and about that either aren't so supportive, but which also advance some misunderstandings or misinformation.

May Day 2014: Scarleteen Strikes (Or, With Your Help, We Don't.)

UPDATE! We -- and you! -- did it! WE SO TOTALLY DID IT! We met the minimum goal we needed to to avoid a strike and having to shut down any of our services. We can't thank the 1,000+ of you enough who have helped us do this, and who have made it possible for all the young people who need and use our services to keep on using them without interruption.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

Over the next few days, you'll notice some changes on the site. We are finally finishing the process of some design tweaks, and a pretty major reorganization of our static content on the site.

We hope everyone will be as excited about what we have come up with as we are!

Happy 15th Birthday, Scarleteen!

bday

We are 15 years old today. FIFTEEN! (In internet years, that's like being 500.)

We debuted online on December 15th, 1998 and here we are, still rolling, and wanting to keep on rolling some more, in 2013.