Executive Overview
On a humid summer afternoon in the Bronx, a classroom of teenagers stares intently at a tempting bag of chocolate-chip cookies resting in the center of their table. "Just go ahead and eat them!" quips Ponny White, a senior instructor with Project DOT, breaking the tension and drawing a wave of laughter from the group. For high school students spending their precious summer vacation inside a classroom, the energy is remarkably high—a testament to an engaging, dynamic teaching style.
However, these students are not here to remedy lagging math grades or prep for standardized tests. They are participating in a comprehensive lesson on sexual education—a vital subject glaringly absent or heavily sanitized in a vast majority of United States school systems. Specifically, White and her colleagues are tackling topics that traditional curricula routinely sidestep: sexual violence, consent, boundary-setting, and prevention.
White serves as the senior prevention coordinator for the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault and spearheads Project DOT (which stands for Dream, Own, Tell), an initiative explicitly designed to support historically marginalized youth. What makes this particular initiative noteworthy, however, is its financial and strategic backer: the Kering Foundation. As the corporate philanthropic arm of the global luxury goods titan Kering—home to elite fashion houses like Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga—the foundation’s involvement highlights an increasingly vital cross-sector alliance between high fashion and grassroots social justice.
This deep-dive investigation explores the mechanics of Project DOT, the systemic failures of American sex education that make such programs necessary, the corporate motivations driving luxury conglomerates to fund anti-violence initiatives, and the long-term implications for the students and communities they serve.
Detailed Chronology
To understand the impact of Project DOT, one must trace how a typical workshop unfolds and how these interventions fit into the broader landscape of youth development in New York City.
The Classroom Experience: Breaking Down Boundaries
During an on-site observation, executive leaders from the Kering Foundation—including Chief Sustainability and Institutional Affairs Officer Marie-Claire Daveu, Kering Americas President Ewa Abrams, and Kering Foundation Executive Director Céline Bonnaire—visited the Bronx classroom to witness the curriculum in action.
The session moves fluidly from icebreakers to complex definitions. Unlike traditional, abstinence-only, or biological-only sex education that focuses strictly on anatomy and reproduction, Project DOT dives straight into the psychological and social frameworks of interpersonal relationships. Students are introduced to the nuanced spectrum of sexual misconduct, learning to differentiate between sexual harassment and sexual assault, and acquiring precise terminology to describe everyday threats faced by youth. These include explicit and unwanted digital communications, peer coercion, and the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery (often referred to as "revenge porn").
For many students, the curriculum is entirely unprecedented. Fifteen-year-old Maymuna reflects on how the sessions transformed her perspective: "For me, I kind of expanded my definition on what sexual violence means. I actually did not know about what it really entailed for some of the things I was learning. I learned more about what it means to set up boundaries, because I myself kind of struggle with setting them up."
Another student, 17-year-old Isabella, notes the universal vulnerability young people face: "Sometimes you’ll think, ‘Oh, maybe this won’t happen to me,’ but everybody’s under the same umbrella of stuff being able to happen to them."
A History of Grassroots Advocacy
Project DOT operates under the umbrella of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, an organization that has spent more than two decades fighting to eradicate sexual violence through community education, advocacy, and support services. Project DOT specifically targets youth development, utilizing a three-pronged approach: education, leadership development, and active bystander engagement. By equipping teenagers with the tools to recognize abuse, support peers, and intervene safely, the program aims to build safer, more informed networks from the ground up.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Crisis in American Sex Education
The urgency of Project DOT’s mission is underscored by national data regarding sex education in the United States. According to comprehensive reports by the Guttmacher Institute and other public health organizations, sex education in American public schools remains profoundly fragmented, underfunded, and often politically compromised.
The Curriculum Void
While a majority of states mandate some form of sex education, the quality, accuracy, and content vary wildly depending on zip codes, local school boards, and state legislation.
- The Abstinence-Only Legacy: Despite decades of evidence proving their ineffectiveness, abstinence-until-marriage programs continue to receive federal and state funding in numerous jurisdictions, leaving students unequipped to navigate modern dating, consent, and digital safety.
- The Absence of Safety Education: Comprehensive topics such as emotional abuse, digital harassment, sexual assault, and healthy boundary-setting are routinely omitted. As Maymuna points out regarding her own educational background: "We just don’t really receive sex ed. For example, in my school, we only received it in fifth grade… And we only had it for, I think, one or two days."
- The Inequality of Access: Marginalized youth—particularly low-income students of color in urban centers like the Bronx—frequently attend underfunded schools where holistic health curricula are the first to be cut in favor of standardized testing prep.
The Ripple Effect of Ignorance
When schools fail to provide robust education on consent and sexual violence, the burden falls on community organizations and nonprofits to fill the gap. Programs like Project DOT step into this vacuum, ensuring that teenagers receive scientifically accurate, trauma-informed, and culturally competent information before they enter college or the workforce.
As 15-year-old Ashlynn notes during the workshop: "This is my first time learning something about this and even doing a project on it, so it’s very eye-opening."
Official Statements & Corporate Motivation
A critical question arises when examining initiatives like Project DOT: Why would a global luxury conglomerate, historically associated with haute couture, high-end leather goods, and runway shows in Paris and Milan, choose to invest heavily in Bronx-based sex education?
The Corporate Perspective: Kering’s Strategic Vision
According to Marie-Claire Daveu and Céline Bonnaire, Kering’s philanthropic focus on gender-based violence is rooted in a twofold mission: driving systemic global impact and fostering community resilience.
"We have to train really young people and the young generations because they are the future," Daveu tells Teen Vogue.
For Kering, this educational philosophy does not stop at funding external nonprofits; it is woven directly into the corporation’s internal culture. Ewa Abrams, president of Kering Americas, highlights how the principles taught in classrooms like Project DOT mirror the company’s internal human resources and social responsibility policies:
"You can intervene and you can educate, talk to your friends, talk to your friend groups. So we actually take that same philosophy as part of the pillars of the foundation work and we train our employees. We have a dedicated policy related to domestic violence. Our employees become the ambassadors. They become, sort of, culturally responsible for doing good in the world."
Abrams adds that the alignment between classroom education and corporate culture is intentional: "The connection is really that we take that training component that you’re seeing in the room right now and we bring that to our employee community… So what I actually loved about this particular training, [was that] ‘to educate’ was this repeated concept."
Confronting Industry Realities
Beyond philanthropy, the fashion industry faces a well-documented internal reckoning regarding gender-based violence and workplace exploitation. Studies and investigative reports have repeatedly highlighted how power imbalances within the fashion supply chain—ranging from garment factories to modeling agencies—leave vulnerable workers exposed to sexual harassment, coercion, and abuse.
While Kering is not yet implementing Project DOT-style trainings directly across its vast international supply chain, Daveu acknowledges that this remains part of a longer-term strategic vision. At present, the immediate corporate goal is to train all approximately 44,000 corporate employees worldwide, establishing a baseline educational ethos across the company and its major brand partners. "It’s really a way also to raise awareness," Daveu emphasizes.
Future Outlook: Empowering the Next Generation of Changemakers
Ultimately, the true metric of success for Project DOT lies in its ripple effect—how teenagers take the lessons learned in a summer classroom and apply them to their daily lives, peer groups, and future communities.
Cultivating Bystander Intervention and Peer Support
The curriculum is designed not merely to inform, but to empower. By teaching students how to recognize early warning signs of abuse, how to articulate their own boundaries, and how to safely intervene when friends are in distress, the program transforms passive observers into active advocates.
Ashlynn summarizes this multiplier effect with remarkable clarity:
"I think, personally, I will start instilling it into my friendships. Because I may not be getting into relationships as much, but I know my friends, and I don’t want them to be in a situation where they experience this type of violence. And if they are, then I want them to be prepared and I want them to know that they can get through it."
A Blueprint for Public-Private Partnerships
As public school systems continue to struggle with funding shortfalls, political polarization over health curricula, and administrative constraints, the collaboration between grassroots organizations like the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault and corporate foundations like Kering offers a compelling blueprint for the future.
By pooling financial resources, operational scale, and community expertise, these partnerships can bypass bureaucratic hurdles to deliver life-saving education directly to the youth who need it most.
As Project DOT continues to expand its reach across New York City, it proves that when young people are given the language to name their experiences, the tools to set boundaries, and the community support to heal and intervene, they become the most powerful catalysts for systemic change. The classroom in the Bronx may only hold a dozen students on a quiet summer afternoon, but the lessons forged within its walls echo far beyond—shaping a safer, more conscious generation for the future.
