Ericka Medina showed her elders who the boss was when she led a birth control workshop at the Miccio Center in Red Hook as a 14-year-old peer health educator with the Red Hook Initiative, a group committed to overturning inter-generational poverty.
The attendees included a 40-something woman who scoffed at the self-assured teenager.
“She said to me, ‘What are you going to teach me that I don’t already know?’ ” says Medina, who stepped up with information about female-friendly alternatives to condoms, making the woman sit up and listen.
“She apologized to me when she left and said she had learned a lot,” says the Woman of Distinction, 24, who now runs the program she attended as a youngster.
Medina is a reproductive health educator engaged in an urgent conversation about sexual health and behavior with at-risk youngsters, whose troubles she knows firsthand. She grew up in Brownsville, the murder capital of New York, with an alcoholic father who beat her mother — an ordeal she tried ignoring.
“I remember painting a smile on my face so that I could think everything was okay,” Medina told 2,500 people at the New York Women’s Foundation’s “Celebrating Women Breakfast” in 2008 — around the same time she was learning about social and emotional health, and discovering invaluable coping skills at the Red Hook Initiative.
“Red Hook gave me the space to be angry or upset, and made me open up and mend and heal,” says Medina who now provides the same outlet to other youngsters.
She trains them to mentor their peers on reproductive health education, including abstinence, sex and sexuality, and sexual decision making, and takes them on instructional trips to other peer groups, industry conferences, and local clinics.
“I let them know that they are better than their circumstances,” says Medina, who has schooled aspiring coaches at the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, appeared as a guest on the “Tyra Banks Show” about teens and sexually transmitted diseases, and been lauded for her efforts by Community Board 6 and Medgar Evers College.
Her strength lies in her ability to listen and be pro-active.
When a 16-year-old youth came to her with a sexual identity crises and told her he could not discuss it at a conventional support group, Medina and two fellow advocates created a program for minors who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, or queer.
“Now he has the resources and support he needs in a safe place, and he is comfortable with who he is,” she says.
Medina’s kindness and knowledge helped her to refocus her life, claims high-school senior Sanji Downing, 17, a former peer health educator headed to college to become a teacher.
“Ericka motivated me to go for my dreams, and working with her has pushed my confidence to the max,” says Downing.
The Woman of Distinction has worked hard to turn personal tragedy into triumph, but helping others do the same has made her journey more purposeful.
“It feels good to have this calling,” she says.
OCCUPATION: Reproductive health educator.
COMPANY: Red Hook Initiative.
CLAIM TO FAME: Getting people to care about reproductive health.
FAVORITE PLACE: Red Hook Initiative.
WOMAN I ADMIRE: Group founder Jill Eisenhard because she makes things happen.
MOTTO: Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done.
