About Us
Our History
Our Work
Our Impact

About Us

In Central America, traditional gender norms, scarce economic and educational opportunities, diminishing social services, restrictive laws and norms on sex education and contraceptive methods, and overwhelming sexual and family violence mean that women and young people often lack the information, support, and decision-making power that would enable them to navigate their lives with equal rights and opportunities.

In this context, the non-profit organization Puntos de Encuentro (Spanish for “Meeting Places” or “Common Ground”) works to promote women's and young people's human rights and daily life well-being. We use education and communication for social change to encourage a reframing of social issues in both public and private discourse, inspiring young people and women to make and carry out decisions about the things that affect them and to create new avenues for personal and collective action against discrimination and violence. Currently, our work directly reaches more than a million young people and women in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, and the United States.

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Our History

Puntos was born out of the reflections of a group of feminists at the end of Nicaragua's revolutionary decade (1979-1990). These women's experiences during the revolution led them to question the authoritarian relationships that pervaded Nicaraguan political culture and society at large in a deeply Catholic country that had lived through a long dictatorship and then a U.S.-sponsored civil war. They founded Puntos as a non-partisan organization that would seek to analyze and change these unequal relations. Although the founders were all women, they acknowledged the importance of working side by side with men and of the need to adopt a generational approach, recognizing that young people are equally oppressed by authoritarianism at home and in society. 

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Our Work

All of our programs are integrated into our on-going flagship project, Somos Diferentes, Somos Iguales (SDSI, Spanish for We're Different, We're Equal), which combines popular media (including the hit youth-focused television series, Sexto Sentido, our youth talk radio program, SSRadio, and our women's magazine, La Boletina, and audiovisual educational packs) with multi-sector alliances, local capacity building, and leadership training.

Our work is intentionally multi-thematic, using issues such as HIV and STIs, sexual abuse and rape, sexual exploitation, domestic and gender violence, sexual identity, microcredit, maquilas, abortion, physical and mental differences, multiculturalism, social class, migration, collective action, and others, as lenses through which to address issues related to gender and generational relations and norms, as well as stigma and discrimination.

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Our Impact

The Somos Diferentes Somos Iguales project reaches and significantly impacts young people on a massive scale, according to a recent comprehensive impact evaluation currently being published by the U.S.-based Horizons Project. The study calculates that SDSI regularly reaches approximately 700,000 young people in Nicaragua, and many more throughout the region.

The evaluation demonstrates that, bolstered by Sexto Sentido's popularity and scope, SDSI's integrated approach has made a positive contribution to young people's attitudes and behaviors about HIV prevention, gender equity, discrimination, and knowledge and use of health and social service providers. In particular, SDSI contributed to greater interpersonal communication on a number of issues, which turned out to be a key entry point for practicing sexual responsibility: Sexually active young people who had talked with other young people about these issues were significantly more likely to feel they could negotiate safer sexual practices with their partners, and this sense of efficacy led them to actually talk to their partner about prevention and be more likely to practice preventive behaviors.

Local organizations reported that SDSI created new opportunities for dialogue and debate about taboo topics in families, schools, with friends and in organizations and the media; strengthened their own work and enabled the development of new initiatives; and strengthened youth leadership, collective efficacy, and links and alliances between individuals, groups, and social movements.

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Download our most recent impact evaluation here.