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Credit: Nick Romanenko
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Position: Director, Network for Family Life Education, Center for Applied Psychology, New Brunswick/Piscataway
Length of Service: Seven years in various positions; director since January 2005
Hometown: Metuchen
What she does: Sorace supervises programs, finances and a staff of 11 at the Network for Family Life Education, one of the leading national organizations working on adolescent sexuality education issues in the United States. She oversees the network’s two major projects: the Sexuality Education Training Initiative, which provides professional development to 2,000 health professionals a year, and the national Teen-to-Teen Sexuality Education Project. This project consists of the Sex, Etc. newsletter for teens by teens, distributed to 2.1 million nationwide; the Web site, Sexetc.org, averaging 60,000 visitors per day; and collaborations with other national youth media, such as MTV.com and Seventeen.
An early interest: How does a girl from Mifflintown, Pa. – Amish country in the “middle of nowhere” – end up being an activist for sex education? Sorace’s interest in sex education goes back to her days on the high school debate team when she argued for parental notification before teens access services, such as birth control and abortion. That attitude began to change when she got to college and realized, by such examples as a dorm mate suing for nonpayment of child support, that all families are not as unified as hers. Sorace’s attitudes about sexuality crystallized through her work with cancer patients – men and women too embarrassed, despite the ordeals caused by the disease, to talk about certain areas of their own bodies. She graduated from Albright College in Reading, Pa., with a bachelor’s degree in psychobiology, and in 1994, was hired to lead the teen health initiatives at a family planning consortium in Pennsylvania and direct the state coalition to prevent teen pregnancy.
Passing the torch: Sorace was tapped as network director upon the retirement of Susan Wilson, who had pressed Trenton more than two decades ago to mandate state-sponsored sex education in public schools. The network, in the process of expanding its space on the Livingston campus, has been at Rutgers since its inception and is now part of the Center for Applied Psychology at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology. Wilson led the network for more than 20 years until her December 2004 retirement and now acts as senior adviser to the organization. “People always tell me that I have difficult shoes to fill,” Sorace says. “I don’t even try. Susie had the strength and energy to make a lifetime commitment to what she believed in – and is still involved. It’s hard to match that.”
What she loves about her job: “I enjoy working with this age group. It is a time of change, so full of possibility,” Sorace says. But there is also cause for concern: Surveys show that 30 percent of the nation’s 15-year-olds are having sex, yet adolescents have few places to turn to for accurate information about sex. “Just clearing up misconceptions, such as ‘drinking Mountain Dew kills sperm,’ can help teens avoid pregnancy and disease,” she says. Sorace also likes the job’s variety: One day she might be reviewing articles submitted by members of the network’s teen editorial board for publication, the next discussing upcoming changes to the Web site or meeting with individual donors and foundations. Fund raising is a regular part of her day-to-day schedule – the network raises its entire budget of $1.6 million.
Sidelights: While working for the network, Sorace earned a master’s of public policy degree from the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. She serves as treasurer of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association in Washington, D.C. She also is a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity’s Youth Build. This was her fourth summer with the organization, spending a week in Ashland, Va., with 50 teens. “It’s an extraordinary week spent nailing down sub-floor, building walls, door and window frames. There’s nothing when we arrive, and a house when we leave.”
Know someone who deserves to be in the spotlight? Contact Focus editor Carla Cantor at ccantor@ur.rutgers.edu.
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