Our Mission and History

For more than 15 years, CHANGE has advocated for the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls worldwide.

Our Mission

The Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) is a U.S.-based non-governmental organization whose mission is to ensure that U.S. international policies and programs promote women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health within a human rights framework. CHANGE believes that every individual has the right to basic information, technologies, and services needed to enjoy a healthy and safe sexual and reproductive life free from coercion and preventable illness. CHANGE envisions a world where sexual and reproductive health and rights are universally recognized and sexual and reproductive health care is accessible and available to all.

Our History

In 1994, the United States and nearly 180 other countries gathered in Cairo at the International Conference on Population Development (ICPD) and committed--for the first time--to promoting and protecting women's and girls' sexual and reproductive rights as a universal human right. CHANGE, then known as the Health Development and Policy Project, was founded immediately following the ICPD to hold the U.S. government accountable for that commitment. Since becoming an independent non-profit organization in 2001, CHANGE has expanded the breadth and depth of its policy and advocacy work to focus on both the executive and legislative branches, and to encompass a range of issues that affect sexual and reproductive rights and health.

During the Bush Administration, evidence-based research became the fulcrum of CHANGE's policy priorities. In 2006 and 2007, CHANGE focused its efforts on using credible and tested evidence to support eliminating the Global Gag Rule, the anti-prostitution pledge, and “abstinence until marriage” earmarks, in addition to integrating comprehensive sexual and reproductive programming into the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).  We also launched the Prevention NOW! Campaign on female condoms, and joined the Women Won’t Wait Campaign on the intersection between gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS.

CHANGE has also begun working domestically by connecting with and mobilizing a base of U.S. supporters, among groups such as students; reproductive justice advocates; faith-based, HIV/AIDS, and women’s organizations.

Currently, CHANGE's main objective is to promote a woman-centered, human rights-based framework for all U.S. foreign policies and programs. The framework is designed to reflect CHANGE’s most basic belief—that women’s rights are human rights.

As a part of the framework, CHANGE advocates for:

  • Comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights education and services in all U.S. international policy and programming;
  • Integrated sexual and reproductive health services in all HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence, family planning, and maternal health programs; 
  • Facts- and evidence-based research as the basis of all U.S. international policy and programming.