Ongoing Learning Hub

These quick 1-hour sessions take a chunk of comprehensive sexuality education to examine themes and values that are often overlooked. The aim is to provide tips, conceptual frameworks, and activities that can take good conversations to new, comprehensive heights. The series is for anyone engaging in sexual health education. From teachers to healthcare providers to those facilitating community programs – please come join the conversation to raise the bar for our health and wellbeing.

HIV & Stigma

Monday, December 1, 11 am – 12:30 pm

The world has been living with HIV for over 40 years, and many medical advancements have changed how some individuals live with the virus. Unfortunately, some things never change, and stigma is still the driving force deteriorating people’s health.

This quick session will cover various ways to talk about HIV and STIs, with stigma being the focal point, in order to create healthier communities.

Consent: Willing & Enthusiastic 

Monday, December 15, 11 am – 12:30 pm 

Yes means Yes. No means No. “Yeah, I guess we can do that” means…? Certainly, we want consent to be specific and clear, but our levels of enthusiasm vary in our lives, including towards sexual situations.

This quick session goes over ways to discuss enthusiasm on a continuum that encourages conversations to make things clear.

Restrictive Gender Norms: The Basis of Gender-Based Violence

Monday, January 12, 11 am – 12:30 pm 

How gender-based violence presents itself in our lives is varied. In all of these variations, power, control, and rigid gender norms are present. With an understanding of this common foundation, we can use “upstream” strategies to reduce gender-based violence.

This quick session will give a few ideas on how to start conversations about how rigid gender norms negatively impact everyone.

Emptying Pipelines: Empathy & Accountability 

Monday, January 26, 11 am – 12:30 pm 

Understanding how we fit in a complex world is…well, complex. None of us has all the “right” takes on the issues our world is facing. Demonizing individuals or groups of individuals often gives them the push they need to be fed into pipelines that drive isolation, radicalization, and violence.

This quick session will discuss hard discussions about empathy for those perpetuating violence without abandoning accountability. The primary focus will be on patriarchy and the so-called “manosphere.”

Vulvas & Fluids

Monday, February 9, 11 am – 12:30 pm  

Cum and ejaculation aren’t just for penises anymore and… *checks notes*… never was! Bodies with vulvas produce various fluids from different glands, just like bodies with a penis.

This quick session will go over those fluids, how to discuss them with people as young as ten, and why it has been missing from sexuality education conversations for way too long.

Reproductive Coercion & Justice: When Choice Isn’t A Choice 

Monday, February 23, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Pregnant people in Canada have the right to choose parenting, adoption, or abortion. But rights are not always easy to exercise for various reasons. “Choice” is a word often associated with abortion and the many barriers to this form of healthcare.

This quick session will dive deeper and explore how “choice” is a complex word to discuss parenting in a world of child apprehension, miscarriages, and costly fertility treatments.

Violence Continuum: Criminalization to Normalization

Monday, March 9, 11 am – 12:30 pm

Using an activity from Action Canada’s “Beyond the Basics,” this quick session will explore the various ways sexual violence presents in society.

We will then continue to connect the dots and envision a world of reduced harm.

Relationship to Power: Beyond Legal Definitions

Monday, March 23, 11 am – 12:30 pm 

When it comes to sexual consent in Canada, the age of consent is 16 years old unless there is a relationship of power. This would include positions like employer, teacher, coach, and social worker. Though, to really understand power in relationships, we need to go beyond legal definitions, because no relationship is completely equal, and power is always present.

This quick session will run through not only how to identify power imbalances in relationships, but also how to evaluate how that power is being used.

This workshop provides a great foundation for building a welcoming environment for 2STLGBQIA+ peoples at your workplace. This workshop is designed to be applicable to various settings and sectors.

The workshop will cover basics like the difference between sex, gender, and attraction. It will also provide you with small changes you can make immediately and resources to help you maintain that welcoming environment long after the workshop is over. 

In times of political and economic uncertainty, a consequence is a reactive tightening of gender norms. This reduction of who we are and how we can express ourselves impacts us all, but those impacts are not all equal.

Predominantly, violence rises from boys and men towards girls, women and gender non-conforming peoples. The violence of patriarchy on boys and men doesn’t often receive as much examination. How do we stand up and address the rise of this form of violence in our communities?

This workshop aims to establish a framework of empathy and accountability for individuals perpetuating violence. Various intersecting social factors that feed this phenomenon will be discussed to place us in a position to take action. Then we’ll figure out how to discuss all of these topics using more approachable language.

Interested in being a sexuality educator or sharpening your skills? This workshop is a great place to start. The beginning of this workshop covers the values, approaches, and theoretical basis of our work. Then we cover a range of activities and facilitation skills you can use immediately to cover various sexual and reproductive health topics.

This training draws on SERC’s multiple decades of experience facilitating thousands of workshops and over a decade of training teachers on sexuality education in multiple Manitoba school divisions. If that wasn’t enough experience, we reference national organizations like Action Canada, SIECCAN, and similar sexual health organizations across the country.

Just like the sources we draw upon for this training, the outcomes are relevant for those who work in and out of schools. The content is appropriate for those who work with people in their teens and older, with many of the activities being adaptable for those as young as 10 years old.

Formats: In-person & Virtual

Length: 2 days 

SERC has been training and consulting on comprehensive sexuality education in Manitoba for over 20 years. Teen Talk, our youth program, has been leading hundreds of workshops every year in and out of classrooms with youth for the same amount of time. This workshop is the foundation of our work.

As the world keeps changing, our workshop development is ongoing. If applicable, this training can speak to the Manitoba Health Curriculum learning outcomes, but we often go beyond those objectives to be more comprehensive. With a potential new curriculum on the horizon, we can help give you a head start. Not in a school? No problem, as comprehensive sexuality education has a place in many venues in and outside of school environments.

Interested in being a sexuality educator or sharpening your skills? This workshop is a great place to start. This workshop covers the values and approaches to our work. However, the bulk is exploring sexual and reproductive health topics with associated activities that you can use right away with learners of various age levels.

Format: LMS

Length: Self-directed (~3 hours)

Our Operating Principles course is part of the introduction to Teaching Comprehensive Sexuality: Facilitation Skills. This self-directed course goes over the Teen Talk operating principles and how they may come up in discussions about sexual and reproductive health. The course wraps with examples from the Question Box tool that demonstrate how these principles can be applied.

No longer available

Workplace sexual harassment is a harmful pattern of behaviour that negatively impacts individual staff as well as larger workplace units and teams. Over the course of three evenings, we would break down our project’s full session, where participants would identify and discuss the underlying issues that may lead to harmful workplace sexual harassment and develop a practical lens and understanding of what ‘Consent at Work’ means in and for their workplace. Participants left with effective skills for bystander intervention, as well as knowledge on how to better support staff who have disclosed experiences of workplace sexual harassment, and information on navigating the local resource map of support available to Manitobans.

Learn how practicing Consent at Work can contribute to your workplace culture’s foundation of trust, respect, and safety from the harms of workplace sexual harassment.

Visit consentatwork.ca to learn more.

Formats: In-person & Virtual

Length: Half day & Full day

People living with intellectual and developmental disabilities are sexual beings with diverse experiences like everyone else, but face unique barriers to sexual and reproductive autonomy. This introductory training aims to support growth in service providers looking to enhance their skills being reactive to “teachable moments” as well as proactive in starting conversations around sexual and reproductive health with those they support. 

Formats: In-person, Virtual & LMS

Lengths: Half day, Full day, and LMS Self-directed (~3 hours) 

Supporting diversity and promoting inclusion are essential components of working with people in culturally relevant and safe ways. This training opportunity invites service providers to broaden their awareness and build capacity around Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and Aromantic identities and experiences.

Formats: In-person & LMS

Lengths: Half day, Full day, and LMS Facilitated (~1 week)

People of all ages live much more of their lives online than 20 years ago. Digital dating apps are no longer trends, but norms in many places. Is it any surprise that young people are developing and experiencing their sexuality online as well? This training focuses on how to reduce the risks and increase the benefits of online sexuality through an essential life skill: consensual literacy. Service providers will leave with understandings of the legal aspects of viewing and sending sexual material and ways to have open, non-judgmental conversations about sexuality and technology with youth.

Formats: In-person & Virtual

Length: Half day

In this workshop, we will share information about Our Selves, Our Daughters Program, an award-winning initiative that provides space and resources for newcomer women from communities affected by female genital cutting (FGC) working for a change within their communities in Winnipeg, and advocating for improved care and support offered by service providers. This session will provide an overview of program learnings, challenges and successes, and SERC’s approach when working with these communities.

Formats: In-person & Virtual

Length: Full-day

The Queering the Compass training promoted sexual and reproductive health within 2STLGBQIA+ communities while improving the capacity of healthcare workers and service providers who serve them. This training addressed gaps in healthcare services and empower healthcare professionals in providing inclusive care.

View Queering the Compass page for module information