Altu

Altu began with a question its founder couldn’t stop asking: who benefits when children don’t know their bodies, their rights, their options?

She first asked it out loud in a graduate classroom, but she’d been living inside the answer for years. Working with K-12 students in North Carolina, in communities with some of the highest STI and teen pregnancy rates in the state, she watched a state mandate require that any sex education be abstinence-based. She went back to school at 39 to study global sexual and reproductive health, immigrated to Ireland in 2025, and founded Altu to do something about it.

The name carries the mission. In Irish, altú means nourishing or fostering. Its Latin root, altus, means elevated. Two languages, one idea: Rise in Knowledge. Rise in Power.

Altu creates comprehensive sexuality education that goes full circle. Young people don't just get accurate information about their bodies, they learn the history and policy that shaped who got that information and who was denied it. Our work is grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UNFPA and UNESCO International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education, and the reproductive justice framework, so the "why" is taught alongside the "what."

We work at three levels: delivering free, multilingual CSE directly to young people, including through our youth arm ALT you (ages 13+); building capacity in the parents, caregivers and educators around them; and giving institutions an evidence-based way to evaluate whether what they deliver is genuinely comprehensive.

Ireland is a deliberate home. It gives Altu independence from US political constraints, and it's a country with its own hard-won understanding of what happens when reproductive decisions are controlled for people rather than by them. We're Irish founded and built for global reach.

Where we are now: a CLG in formation, working pro bono with a solicitor, with an application to the Charities Regulator to follow incorporation. We're building our audience through social media first, with a free, multilingual curriculum as the long-term goal.

The board today is Dana Pacini, founder and director, who holds an MSc in Global Sexual and Reproductive Health and a BS in Public Health, with a background spanning public health education and community development lending; and Rachel Ruben, director, who brings a non-profit fundraising background. Rachel is US-based, which is why the third seat is specifically for a director resident in Ireland.

We need a third director to complete the board before we can file. A genuine founding seat, shaping Altu's governance from the start. We're looking in particular for strength in Irish charity governance, financial oversight, and child safeguarding for our work with under-18s.