TARSHI (Talking About Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues) believes that all people have the right to sexual wellbeing and to a self-affirming and enjoyable sexuality. We support and enable people’s control and agency over their sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing through information dissemination, knowledge and perspective building, within a human rights framework.
Founded in 1996, TARSHI has firmly held an affirmative and rights-based approach to sexuality. Our perspective is sex-positive, non-heteronormative, pleasure-affirming, and not fear-based.
We strongly believe in each individual’s right to make their own choices in freedom and dignity.
We work in the best interests of all, aim to be as inclusive as possible, remain non-judgemental, maintain boundaries and confidentiality, and treat each other with respect, in terms of the people we work with, directly and indirectly, or when it comes to reporting about people and incidents related to our work.
We strive for high quality in our work, making sure that the information we give is both accurate and easily accessible – that is, readily available to those it is intended for, easy to understand, inclusive and audience-oriented.
Stress management and burnout prevention have been an integral part of our work since our inception as a helpline offering information, counselling and referrals on issues related to sexuality. We were (and are) mindful that this kind of work on sexuality – from a pleasure-affirming perspective, even while we live in societies that are yet to affirm sexual and reproductive rights of all individuals – has the potential to cause stress, dissonance, distress, and burnout. This led us to incorporate techniques on, and build an environment that facilitates, stress management, burnout prevention and self-care since we began work in 1996. Over the years we took this work to broader contexts of sexuality and development work beyond counselling, leading us to our recent work on self-care, stress management and burnout prevention among those of us who do people work.
Click the sections below to learn about various aspects of our work.
