The Body Freedom Fighters: how we went from a problem to a solution
Written by Bruna De Cristofaro
To find rational explanations for why you are concerned about a social issue rather than another is easier said than done.
The 5 whys technique helped us a lot in that. It brought us to inquiry our own minds and cause-effects relations by asking ourselves not once, but five times why we do care about sex education, body awareness and puberty rights.
This has been how we have identified the problem among various problems, what we like to call the root cause. Willing to keep it sweet and simple, we confronted the audience with the problem rather than re-formulating it in our own words: we collected some of the most googled sexual-related questions by young audiences.
“Do I have to use condoms when I am in a relationship?” “How should I use a menstrual cup?” “How do I know if I like sex?” are just some of our results which show how such urgent, intimate, confidential and essential questions deserve specific and scientific answers given in a protected room, free from prejudices.
Our willingness to create such a protected room inspired our vision: to spread awareness about puberty education and menstrual hygiene so that every young womxn knows about her body rights.
The first concern popping up in our minds was that we would never be able to deliver a solution adaptable to all young womxn. Because of cultural, geographical, social, religious and psychological diversities there is no solution that could serve as a universal passe-partout.
Nevertheless, the process of acknowledging that our social innovation would not be going to save the entire planet has been our strength, rather than our weak point.
It helped us to become specific, so specific until our social innovation turned out to be feasible, efficient, doable and therefore effective.
This is the story of how we started to focus on Germany, a well-known place for us, and on young womxn in puberty age, because we ourselves were once in their position.
Our idea was to make this “protected room, free from prejudices” a physical one, where young womxn could gather and explore the potential of peer interchange being at the same time monitored and supported not by a search engine like google or a silent book of biology, but by real, professional and open-minded people such as sexual experts and gynaecologists.
This is how the Body Freedom Fighters Summer Boot Camp took shape.
After we were convinced that our idea was valuable, it was time to start convincing our potential investors, customers, partners and co-founders.
Our pitch deck — that we had the opportunity to present to Jeremy Caplan from the CUNY Craig Newmark School of Journalism in New York City — summarised our business model idea, our competitors and our plan for investments and use of fund.
There it started:
The BFF-Summer Bootcamp should be a social project, offering the best possible education while being accessible to all.
The partners of our project are specialists from different medical and psychological fields. They include gynaecologists, psycologists for children and young adults, sex therapists, counselling centres for women, breast care specialists, endocrinologists and endometrial doctors. In addition to financial experts, various Tik-Tok influencers play a major role: they share our project with their followers and help to make it better known.
Our key activities are our summer boot camps. In these ten-day boot camps, the young womxn are not only given the best workshops by experts, but they also learn a lot about themselves through peer education. We also want to offer workshops as part of theme days at schools. Our key resources are our human resources: our team works closely with our experts. But also our partner companies for womxn’s hygiene products contribute a lot to our work, as they are part of our financial resources. We need these resources to make our value proposition come true in the best possible way: “Spread awareness, implement womxn’s body rights, re-think education concerning sexuality and body rights”.
Our target group are young womxn in Germany in advanced puberty age (16–18 years old). In order to reach them, we use our website, as well as our TikTok and instagram channel.
In order to be able to offer our bootcamp as cost-effectively as possible for the participants, we came up with the following strategy: to cover our costs for accommodation, room and board, materials (books, digital devices), human resources like designers, sales managers, experts, catering, tutors, marketing and advertising, our revenue streams include a registration fee, advertisement for partner companies, as well as endowments.
Our Website: https://bodyfreedomfighters.com
Our Instagram channel: @bodyfreedomfighters
Our Tik Tok channel: @bodyfreedomfighters
Meet my team member Antonia Olbrich
