Episode 53: Elise Schuster
Episode 53: An Interview with Elise Schuster, Co-Founder and Executive Director of OkaySo
Join Lori and her guest, Elise Schuster, in this discussion about using digital products to reach more young people. Elise is the co-founder and executive director of OkaySo. They share how their platform provides a safe space for the youth to ask questions they may be too scared to ask in other places. Stay tuned!
Here are the things to expect in this episode:
Here are the things to expect in this episode:
Creating an app that provides youth with resources on sexual education.
What kind of nonprofits are they partnered with?
The different topics that are covered in the app.
And much more!
About Elise Schuster:
Elise Schuster, MPH (they/them), is a sexuality educator with 15 years of experience in youth development and pleasure-based sex education. Elise has a masters in public health from Columbia University with a specialization in sexuality and health. Elise began their work in public health at Physicians for Reproductive Health, training doctors to provide adolescent-friendly reproductive health care. Elise also spent many years teaching workshops at Babeland and having thousands of one-on-one educational pleasure-based sexual health conversations.
After their MPH, Elise spent almost a decade at a premiere NYC youth development center serving over 11,000 marginalized young people every year. Elise had several roles here including running intake and assessment for over 30 new young people every day, overseeing capacity building work, managing 30 student volunteers, starting a professional training institute, and a youth council, and overseeing a $6.5 million wraparound services grant with twelve subgrantee partners.
Connect with Elise!
Website: https://okayso.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heyokayso/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heyokayso
Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyokayso
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/okayso/
Connect with Lori Kranczer!
Episode Transcript
You're listening to the positive impact philanthropy podcast where we share the stories of everyday philanthropists as they incorporate philanthropy into their lives. Philanthropy is a personal journey through the stories we will share here. We hope that it sparks something in you and how you can make your own philanthropic impact in the world. I'm your host, Lori Kranczer attorney, philanthropic advisor and legacy human strategist. Today we're gonna explore what it looks like to be an everyday philanthropist and make a positive impact in the world. Before we get started, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode posted each Wednesday. So today I'm really excited to introduce Elise Schuster. Elise is the co-founder and executive director of OkaySo and this is an incredibly interesting business and I really wanted Elise to come on to talk about what the business looks like, what the impact is, and also about their philanthropic journey. So Elise, welcome.
Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here.
So why don't you get us started and tell us more about you.
So I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, I had very conservative parents. I was not allowed to take sexuality education in high school, which sort of has driven and shaped I think a lot of my life so I have worked as a sexuality educator and worked with young people for about 20 years now. And I've done that in a variety of different ways from working with doctors to working with adults working with young people, and I also work as a trainer and consultant for companies and organizations. Who want to help support LGBTQ employees and create safer workspaces and I also work with parents and really anyone who's trying to support LGBTQ young people. And then okay, so I think really comes from almost all of the experiences that I have had as a sexuality educator, working with young people, really seeing how many gaps there are in the support that folks are getting. we know that less than half of young people in the United States are worrying about birth control in their high school sex ed class. We know the number one place that young people learn about sex is actually pornography. So there are huge, huge gaps and OkaySo really tries to fill those gaps. So we have a mobile app that's free for young people, and we connect them anonymously to experts who provide personalized support and information. So we're really trying to meet them exactly where they are, in the moment when they most have a need, and provide them with someone that they can trust, who can help them figure out sort of what to do next or give them the information they need
So I think this is amazing. And as a parent of two children who answers all their questions all the time we were very family or my husband basically, you know, he's always for some reason is never around, Like doing laundry, but I think this is a great resource for kids. So can you talk a little bit more about what the age range of the average or I should say the you know, of your, of the kids that are listening or are taking part in the app and how, um, how are you doing the outreach? Like, where are they finding out about you?
So young people who are using OkaySo are mostly between the ages of 15 and 24. And that's the age range that we really set out to reach. Recognizing that often when we're younger than that, the questions that we have might be a little bit more fact based. So we might want to know, when am I going to get my period for the first time or How tall am I going to be? You know, a lot of the questions that younger adolescents have are. I don't want to say that they're simple because that makes them seem not important, but they're a little bit easier to find an answer to somewhere. As people get older, life gets more complicated and the personal context of our lives becomes a lot more important. So often our question is not just a question. It's a story that we need to be able to tell someone and that's really what we were thinking about when we were creating. OkaySo was the idea that an article, an advice column, a chat bot, none of those are really taking into account. Okay, I need to be able to tell you this first. This happened and then this happened and then this happened. And now here I am, what should I do? The sort of more impersonal ways that we often try to fill the gaps in sexuality education just cannot really meet that need. So we see that kind of teen kind of teen to young adults group as being the most popular group of folks who are using OkaySo and with that group, how are they finding you? Like I have to find any app or…
Yeah, it's all over the place. So we have a lot of youth serving nonprofits that we have partnered with or work with who tell young people about us, so we can we get the word out that way. They tell each other which is always a nice place to be in. When someone's heard about you from a friend it kind of builds trust automatically that way. And then people find us through actually searching in the App Store and searching in the Google Play Store. So we've done a lot of work, to try to make sure that our keywords and what people are sort of seeing when they find us are, what they need to be so that we're kind of getting folks funneled into what we're doing and not you know, like a sex quiz app or something like that, which is not maybe what they thought they're actually going to want. And we've also been incredibly lucky to have been featured on the app store a couple of times on their today tab, where they actually told the story about the work that we're doing. So that has also brought a lot of people to us, because that gets millions of eyeballs on it every day.
Yeah, that's great. So you know, you mentioned working with nonprofits and I wanted to ask you about this. Do you partner with other nonprofits because I was thinking it would be very helpful for them to use the app inside of their programming or so yeah, you're nodding your head.
Yes. So this is actually something that we really kind of started during COVID. We had spent, I think, a long time trying to convince people that everyone needed more remote solutions needed to be reaching young people using digital products. But it was a harder sell before COVID. I think once the pandemic hit, people realized how behind they were in when they were in sort of, if a youth serving organization is requiring young people to come in in person and they have no other way to get in touch with them. Then there's like a huge gap happening already at the beginning of the pandemic. And so when we partner with folks we take, we make them a team on OkaySo and their staff, whoever they want from their organization to be on that team is there and then the young people that they're already working with can find them there. So they can ask questions outside of business hours, they don't have to come in to get the support that they need. And what I think is really cool is that young people who find us from other places can discover organizations close to them that they might not have known about before. And can actually build trust with the staff there by having those conversations through. OkaySo, which might then actually help them feel more confident coming in person Because it's often very scary. I think for a young person to go to a new organization they've never been to before. They have no idea what it's going to be like, how they're going to be treated. And so it can be really helpful to get to have those conversations with staff ahead of time.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm curious how because I know it's fairly new. But how do you track or can you track any type of results like how's it working? Are you tracking metrics of how many times people come back to the app or like what does that look like?
Yeah, so we there's a few things that we can track and this is something that we are working on every day and trying to constantly improve, so we can track you know how many times people come back, we can track number of messages in a conversation so we can see sort of how much back and forth is happening. How much do young people need, you know, to send several messages to kind of get to the point where they feel like they've got everything they need, which to me is a really important thing, right? If articles were going to solve it, then we would not see a lot of messages back and forth, but we see an average of 10 messages back and forth, right? So there's a lot of conversation going on. So we track things like that. And we know that over a third of young people come back to ask at least one more question. We have folks who've asked 20 30 40 questions over their time on OkaySo, and those rates are higher than some of the other chat text lines that are out there. So you know, we're doing something right. And we're always trying to figure out, you know, can we boost that? Can we give something for people to do who don't have a question right now are there ways that they can learn and be reading things so that they're engaging with the content and engaging with these issues, even if they don't actively have a question that they want to ask sort of in that moment. In our very early days, we did surveys with young people and in those surveys, we found that 95% of folks said that they found that the experts were helpful that they were talking to 80% of folks, so they felt less alone after using OkaySo which I think you know, we know we have this loneliness epidemic happening in the United States right now. So always I think is amazing. And 72% of folks said that they wouldn't have asked that question anywhere else. So they just would have been sitting with it if it hadn't been for OkaySo which I think is also such an amazing thing to realize we're sort of creating a space where people can ask the questions that they're maybe too scared to ask in other places in their lives. And so we're working right now on building into the app, an actual sort of impact measurement system for our experts so that when a conversation is over there, we actually are going to be able to follow up directly with folks sort of in a moment when so imagine someone who needs emergency contraception. And so we're going to check back in with them two or three days later, because that's a very small window of time. See if they were able to get it and then we'll be able to mark within the app. Yes, this person got emergency contraception. So we're working on that right now really trying to build out so that we'll be able to track specific concrete outcomes.
So I so I liked this on so many different levels. Number one, it does give that safe space for young people to ask questions that maybe they're not comfortable speaking about it with friends or family, parents. But I also wonder if there's and hopefully it doesn't happen, but what happens if you see something like a young person maybe in a little bit more need more support? Maybe there's a you know, an issue that has cropped up like what is the next step that you would take if you saw something like that?
Yeah, that happens occasionally. It's definitely a part of life and so often is something that's happening as we're having a conversation with the young person, we realize there's something that's more urgent that needs to get dealt with. And all of our experts are all volunteers, even the staff at organizations. they might be in a meeting, they might be off site that day. So we're not always we're not a hotline, so we're not like immediately, always getting back to someone. So we want to make sure that young people know that and to say, you know, this is the kind of place where you're going to get a response within a couple of hours but you're not having a live chat with someone it seems like a live chat with someone might be the thing that you're needing right now. Can we help you figure out where to go and what's nice is that because we are having this conversation back and forth, we're able to figure out the best place to direct them. So sometimes that's issue based. If it's a sexual assault issue. There are hotlines for that if it's if they're LGBTQ do they want to call the Trevor Project or the trans health lifeline? If they can't be on the phone right now? And do they want to text, there are places that you can text so we're really able to work with them to help do what I like to call sort of a transfer of trust over to another organization who can help them sort of more acutely in that moment. And then we'll follow up with them afterwards and see how they're doing and sometimes we have to do it again. It's sometimes a crisis kind of doesn't always isn't always resolved in a neat tidy bow. The first time someone calls a hotline. I think the other thing that we have seen is that we tend to exist sort of upstream from crises. So I think often having something like OkaySo actually helps prevent young people from getting to the point when they need those hotlines because they're able to address what's going on in a way that feels less stigmatized, sometimes a hotline, a crisis, right? You're sort of like I'm not in crisis. Why should I be calling that, is my thing as bad as other people's things, right? There's all these all those thoughts that we have in our heads. I'm not depressed. I'm not anxious, right, like, so. We try to create an environment where it feels like any question is fair game. There's no stigma. And I think that enables us to help see those things happening before they get to that breaking point and help young people find ways to cope, ways to get support, so that we don't get all the way to that endpoint.
Are there certain categories of questions that you're getting or conversations that you're having that there must be a way to sort of to categorize many of the different things and I wonder if there's a larger majority of a certain type of category than others?
Yes. So we have teams based on topic areas, and so we can see the amount of questions that are coming in to the various teams and so we have the more traditional sexuality education topics like birth control and pregnancy and STI and safer sex but when we started, OkaySo we knew that that that's what young people are getting in school at the best of times. There's a whole host of other things that are all intertwined with those issues that often sexuality education is not talking about at all. And so we have a dating and relationships team. We have a stress and self care team. We have a sex team because young people have tons of questions about what sex is and how it happens. And when they should be having it and how to be having it and no one is talking about that with them. We have an identity team. We want to talk to LGBTQ youth who are often left out. There are seven states where you're actually not allowed to mention LGBTQ young people in sexuality education. And then in a couple of those states, you actually have to talk about it as a non normative identity like you have to sort of disparage it. If we think about the Florida don't say gay bill that DeSantis just signed yesterday. It's all Texas, you know, wanting to say that parents who are who are providing gender affirming care for their trans teens are actually abusing them. There are a lot of states where LGBTQ young people are not only just left out of the conversation, but are actively discriminated against within these educational environments. So we really wanted to make sure that we were trying to be as truly comprehensive as possible. And it turns out, when we look at the amount of questions that we get, that our dating and relationships, stress and self care and sex teams get the most questions, which I'm not surprised about at all because that is exactly where the gaps are.
Okay, so this we could just go on and on this so interesting, but I do want to talk about you. So let's go back and think about or you think about where potentially in your family, your childhood, school, professional life that you started to feel like you wanted to give back. Can you think about that, like okay, can you find that moment in time?
Yeah, I think that you know, for me, it's a couple of different things. So I was very much raised in a family where giving back was just part of our sort of ethos. It was my grandparents were this way they were farmers who would give you know, they had nothing and we're giving things to other people all the time. And that was sort of a value that was really highly praised in my family. I grew up in a single parent home where my where again, we did not have a lot and we were buying Christmas presents for other kids and my mom was helping out in all these different ways. So it was sort of something that was always a part of my life. I'm not sure that I could have gone into any work where giving back was not a part of it. It has always it's been always a part of my professional journey. And I think that I got to these issues specifically because of my own personal experience. Of not being allowed to take sexuality education and really having to figure it all out on my own. I'm old enough that that was before Google. So really even harder. I think I was on bulletin board systems trying to learn things like in like the days before the internet had pictures, you know, just trying to like, sort it all out. So it really, that I think, helps me really stay connected to what young people are experiencing now and all of the shame and fear and misinformation that goes around. And so it was it was something where you know, I I have always wanted to try to help other people not have to go through what I went through.
Okay, and then professionally so I know this translates into what you want to do professionally. How did you get started with your consulting?
The consulting came out of work, I was doing at a youth nonprofit where so I did a lot of workshops and trainings in other areas of my life, sort of my early professional career involved a lot of planning workshops, for actually for doctors, so we wanted to I worked at an organization that wanted to try to improve how doctors talked to young people about these issues, because some doctors are fantastic and some doctors not so much so we would create trainings for them that they would then give because doctors kind of only want to listen to other doctors, they don't really care what I have to say even though you know, masters in public health doesn't really matter. So we were creating the presentations and kind of helping those doctors give them so I got that the idea of sort of facilitation and training and the impact that that can have was something I was doing really early professionally. And then I was working at this youth development organization where I actually built a training institute for them. So we have our staff, actually giving trainings to folks from outside. And one of the trainings that we did was working with LGBTQ young people because that was a population that we worked with a lot. And I started to get people to say like, well, could you come to my organization and give that training to all of my staff because I'm here at this session, but really, there's 40 of us and we all need it and we can't all come to this. So it started there and then it's kind of just grown from there. So and it's grown sort of I've worked with museums, I've worked with clinics, I've worked with parents it's been really fun to see all the different kinds of folks who really want to work on these things.,
Yeah, it's great. So I wanted to ask you for those that are listening and thinking about wanting to do more, have more significance in their professional life, give back, whatever that looks like for them. Any advice that you can give, any tips about taking action or to get started?
I think two things I would say: one would be to really think about what you feel deeply connected to and passionate about. I think often we it's easy to, it's easy to want to feel like there's so many things out there and it can feel overwhelming. It's like there's climate change. There's this there's that like that. There's a million things that you could do and if I think often we tried to sort of spread ourselves too thin and then we social like sort of social service folks get into this very easily, which is this place of feeling like there's you've never done enough or there's always more that could be done and you end up in this place where you're sort of beating yourself up for not having done more. So I really like to recommend, find your lane, figure out the thing that you're the most interested in and figure out what you have the capacity to do. And that might be a certain amount of money per month or year, that might be a certain amount of time that might be some other combination of things. You're going to mentor someone you're going to whatever it might be, but sort of think about what your capacity is and then try to stay committed to that for at least six months and see how it goes and then you can tweak and adjust from there. I think again, we sort of do this thing where we often over we get excited, we're enthusiastic We sort of do we start out doing too much and then we have to dial it back. And that can be really hard for organizations that it happens frequently. And so especially if you're working with any kind if you're working directly volunteering with any kind of population, that's a more marginalized population. I think it's incredibly important to only commit to what you actually can do. Because there's a really common experience of people being like Yeah, yeah, I have absolutely and then not because life happens, right like not being able to hold that. And so there's this kind of constant cycle of abandonment, almost that that can happen, which we maybe don't think about because it's just my one. It's just me not doing it, but it's actually all these people over many years not doing it and that really adds up so I think yeah, I really think it's important to be like super clear about what your capacities are and to own that. Whatever they are is great, right? Any amount of giving back that you can do is awesome. There's no like place you have to reach that makes you like a good person or good at giving back.
Right? You don't have to bear the burden of all the world's problems. You have to find something that you can identify and relate to and work on that there are people out there working on lots of different issues. You don't have to carry it all on your own. Exactly. So, with that we're heading to the end of our talk, and I really would love to know what you consider your legacy to be, yeah, on a on a sort of, I think about this in two ways. I think on an individual level. I think already my legacy is all of the people that I have helped or that OkaySo has helped or that, you know, all of the patients, the doctors that I trained right, like, I can go back even further if I want to but all the people who were met in that moment when they had a need and had someone be there with empathy and compassion, and knowledge and support. And I think even to me, one person who, who got who had that experience is an impact is a legacy that I'm really proud of the world that I am working towards, and we'll see if we can get there is raising a generation of young people who can live authentically as themselves and really thinking about how many of us are not doing that in some aspect of our lives, and how the world would look radically different if we could create a place where everyone could do that. So it's sort of a future legacy, but I hope that that's what it will be.
I hope so too. So, okay, so we're at the end now and where can people find out more about you and OkaySo and everything else that you're doing?
So the best place to go is really I think, OkaySo’s website, which is OkaySo.org and we spell OkaySo O K A Y S O, we do the whole thing spelled out otherwise people think it's Oxo it gets very confusing. So, OkaySo.org And you can find us on social media @heyokayso on Twitter and Instagram and all the places so but yea our website has information about what we're doing with about me, but my co founder, so it's the best place to go, I would say, great, and we're gonna post all the links in the show notes so you'll have easy access to everything. So Elise thank you again for joining us and sharing your story and about the amazing business that you have created. really impactful in a generation that really needs it. We all do, but, you know, it's it makes me feel good as you know, having two children around that age that there was something like this out there for them and their peers. So thank you again for joining us and sharing your your philanthropic Vision.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited that this podcast exists and such an amazing. I love the idea of inspiring people to give back so I'm thank you for making such an awesome thing.
Thank you and for everyone that's joining us. We hope that we provided some insights and inspiration that you can use for your own philanthropic journey. See you next time. Thank you for joining us, I hope we provided some insights and inspiration that you can use for your own philanthropic journey. You can tune in every week on Wednesdays when new episodes are dropped. We'd love to hear your feedback. So leave a comment and a rating about what you like and what you'd like to hear more about. And if you liked the episode today, make sure to share it to raise awareness about the story to inspire other women to take action. I'm Lori Kranczer And until next time, you can make a positive impact through philanthropy every day. Thanks for listening