Brazil
She/Her
2021 Cohort
Laura Ramos Tomás is a certified sexuality educator of European origin. She has lived and worked across Latin America at the intersection of poverty, lack of access to education, and gender - and social inequalities for 6 years, working with organizations that support survivors of trafficking, sex workers, and youth and young mothers living in social vulnerability.
Ana Autoestima 
Laura Ramos Tomás is a certified sexuality educator of European origin. Laura has lived and worked across Latin America at the intersection of poverty, lack of access to education, and gender - and social inequalities for 6 years, working with organizations that support survivors of trafficking, sex workers, and youth and young mothers living in social vulnerability. In 2020, Laura launched TabuTabu, an organization on a mission to normalize healthy dialogue about sex and sexuality for people of all walks of life. TabuTabu’s Impact initiatives co-create contextually relevant sexuality education programs with communities in Brazil and Honduras, tackling their most pressing self-identified learning needs and centering sex- and pleasure-positivity.
During the Pleasure Fellowship, Laura worked on her project ‘Ana Autoestima’ - a virtual sexuality education service for women in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Through this amazing and inspiring project, Laura was granted the Phil Harvey SRHR Innovation Award during the International Conference for Family Planning in 2022. Laura continues being engaged and representing The Pleasure Project as a fellow, with several projects involving partners and organizations in Latin America and around the world.
Laura has developed a manual for IPPF with specific tools for peer educators and youth organizations to adopt a pleasure-based approach: Talking Pleasure with Ease – A guide to the “Why” and “How” of Pleasure-Based Sexual Health in Youth Programming. Through her organization TabuTabu, Laura trained youth educators in El Porvenir, Honduras over 18 months, and together they co-created a sexuality education curriculum for their 6-11 year old students, which was launched in May and is being implemented by the Honduran team.
Highlights
Brazil
2020 Ongoing
Ana Autoestima is a virtual friend that makes accurate information about sexual and reproductive health and rights focused on sexual health and wellbeing for women in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).
She aims to include all people who identify as women, although she promotes her services in favela communities across Rio, so as to reach those women who are furthest removed from sources of comprehensive sexuality education. Ana’s goal is to reach as many such women as possible with succinct and relevant information, and reduce the barriers to access between the information she shares and the friends (service users) she is sharing it with.
“We had the opportunity to exchange with others and it was really inspiring and motivating in a moment where the world was standing still, when I think we were all looking for community. We were working on different types of projects, in different capacities and in different regions of the world, but we had this one thing in common which was really – for me – a source of strength at the time as well”.
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