Thrive Together: Strengthening Contraception through Lived Experience of Flourishing

About Us

Thrive Together focuses on strengthening contraceptive (birth control) interventions by looking at the ways that contraceptive interventions can support people to achieve their goals for their health, wellbeing, and overall ability to flourish in their lives.  In this project we are integrating existing evidence from the fields of human flourishing and voluntary family planning with the lived experience expertise of people of all ages who use contraception, including adolescents. Our aim is to support these lived experience experts to lead alongside researchers and practitioners, deepening and shifting our collective understanding of what contraception means in the context of a thriving life.

The Thrive Together team members come from the Center for Regional Change at the University of California Davis, and from TransformativeStory with team members based across Nigeria, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We work in partnership with community-based groups in Nigeria, Uganda, and community members in California. This work is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

 

Background

Childbearing and reproduction are among the most core functions of human life. Planned, desired childbearing can support parents, children, families, and societies to thrive. Research on human flourishing has demonstrated that reproduction and childbearing are core inflection points through which bonding forms, character develops, and meaning and purpose is cultivated– with lifelong effects (Chen, Weziak-Bialowolska, et al.; VanderWeele).

In low and middle income countries, almost a third of women begin childbearing between the  ages of 10 and 19, and unintended pregnancies make up a half of all pregnancies across life stages globally (8 Billion Lives, Infinite Possibilities: The Case for Rights and Choices; Seeing the Unseen: The  Case for Action in the Neglected Crisis of Unintended Pregnancy). In contrast to the positive effects of planned pregnancies, unintended and mistimed pregnancies can pose devastating risks to mother and child, as well as to the families and communities in which they live (Ganchimeg et  al.; Rah et al.; Tiruneh et al.; Patton et al.). Today, many contraceptive programs are designed and managed with a focus on mitigating this potential harm, rather than fostering the conditions and capacities necessary to support parents, children, families, and communities to thrive. 

This narrow focus has significant limiting implications for the exercise of agency and individual freedoms, as well as the efficacy of contraceptive programs (Seeing the Unseen: The Case for Action in  the Neglected Crisis of Unintended Pregnancy). Globally, lack of awareness and access to contraceptive commodities are no longer the primary barriers to planned pregnancies. Rather, stigma and active opposition to women’s and couples’ agency, self-determination, and autonomy– conditions antipodal to flourishing– are now among the leading barriers (Seeing the Unseen: The Case for Action in the Neglected Crisis of Unintended Pregnancy). This evidence landscape demonstrates a clear need for contraceptive interventions that reach well beyond strategies to reduce unintended pregnancies, to ones that center on cultivating the individual and social capacities for well-being – from individual freedoms and agency, to meaning, purpose, bonding, hopefulness, and beyond– as a pathway to human flourishing that includes contraceptive use. As recent United Nations State of the World Population reports demonstrate, there are rising international calls to re-conceptualize contraceptive program agendas, re-centering women and families (8 Billion Lives, Infinite Possibilities: The Case for Rights and Choices).

Objectives

In Thrive Together we will employ four strategies: 

  • Review of existing literature.

  • Expert interviews.

  • Creative, participatory research methods with contraceptive users.

  • Ground level panels. 
     

We aim to partner with people who use contraception, lived experience experts , and human flourishing and family planning researchers , and practitioners to develop insights that will inform the next generation of voluntary family planning and contraceptive programming. Bringing community members’ voices and decades of scientific research across the fields of contraception and human flourishing into dialogue, our goal is to inform the development of contraception programming, informed by scientific evidence and the lived experience of contraceptive users, that promotes holistic wellbeing.

By synthesizing global evidence and incorporating participatory and creative research processes, Thrive Together aims to develop a new consolidated framework for contraception and wellbeing. This guidance aims to help to reimagine the design, implementation, and measurement of contraceptive interventions, reaching beyond efforts to mitigate adverse health outcomes, to centering users’ wellbeing and ability to realize their aspirations for a thriving life. 


Team

UC Davis Center for Regional Change Team Members

  • Dr. Ahna Ballonoff Suleiman (Principal Investigator and Co-Director ) Dr. Ballonoff Suleiman is the Executive Director of the Center for Regional Change at University California Davis. She has worked for over 30 years as an educator and transdisciplinary developmental scientist, focusing on integrating public health, effective youth engagement, and developmental science to inform policies and programs that support positive SRH trajectories for young people across the globe. She co-founded the UCLA Center for the Developing  Adolescent, and was a founding co-chair of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicines (SAHM) Youth Engagement Committee.

  • Selena Regalado (Research Analyst) has a background in public health and human development. She has conducted research on Latinx health disparities, nutrition policy, and basic income subsidies for low income families. She co-founded the first Indigenous pre-health student organization at UC Davis, Indigenous Health Alliance, assisted various tribes in Southern California with youth-centered initiatives, and was a research associate for the California Tribal Epidemiology Center. She has a strong background in epidemiology, biostatistics, and is building her expertise in qualitative methods and analysis.

Transformative Story Team Members

  • Claire Cole (Project Director) is an executive-level Senior SRHR Technical Advisor and team lead, having led technical strategy and research for flagship sexual and reproductive health and rights programs across Africa and South Asia for 15 years, working with diverse funders and multi-lateral entities. Her work focuses on supporting development of new and collectively owned forms of knowledge, and supporting teams to work in partnership with the communities they seek to serve, applying this knowledge for evidence-based intervention design and adaptive implementation. 
     

  • Dr. Joanna Wheeler (Co-Principal Investigator and Qualitative and Participatory Research Lead) Dr. Wheeler is Sr. Research Fellow at the University of Western Cape, South Africa, and has worked in international health and development for over 20 years as a researcher and consultant, specializing in gender, participatory and mixed methods and creative and arts-based approaches. Dr. Wheeler is an experienced leader of major collaborative global research networks, having directed the Participate initiative from 2012 to 2014, which used participatory research to influence the formation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. She is an experienced researcher of multi-country development programmes, connecting data generated through participatory research to quantitative and qualitative data. She brings extensive research experience in Nigeria. 
     

  • Dr. Fidelis Allen (Qualitative Research Country Lead, Nigeria) Dr. Allen is a seasoned academic, researcher, and project evaluator whose work focuses on gender, climate justice, conflict, and governance. He is a professor of development studies at the University of Port Harcourt and at Rivers State University, and serves as visiting fellow at the University of Leicester. He is an experienced research lead, having led field-based research projects for the European Union, Population Services International, the Women for Women International project, and Naturvernbundet’s ODW project, among others. 
     

  • Pelagia Nziramwoyo (Qualitative Research Country Lead, Uganda) is a health systems programs and participatory research expert and research lead, experienced in qualitative and digital participatory methodologies.  She is a seasoned participatory researcher, having served at Makerere University School of Public Health, the University of Sussex Institute of Development Studies, the University of North Carolina, International Rescue Committee, the International Development Research Center- Canada, and Population Services International. Ms. Nziramwoyo is member of the Community Inter-Agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises, and the Regional Network for Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa.