Examining Community Based Strategies for Tobacco Prevention in the District of Columbia

In March 2010 the District of Columbia Department of Health (DOH) received funding from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) initiative. The District was charged with implementing the evidence-based MAPPS strategies into its core Tobacco Control Program (TCP) to reduce tobacco initiation, use, and exposure. While the DOH tackled the Media and Social Support strategies, they also worked with 10 community organizations who were awarded sub grants from the DOH. The community grantees were charged with implementing at least one of the Access, Price, or Point of Purchase strategies while focusing their efforts on a target community or population within the District. Target communities include African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ, youth, young adults, and residents of select District Wards. This presentation will highlight the innovative strategies that the Community Catalyst Grantees employed to implement their tobacco prevention initiatives. The grantee activities concentrate on garnering support for new tobacco control policies that focus on smoke-free public housing, smoke-free universities, restricting access, price, and point of purchase advertising, through tobacco retailer engagement and trainings, and developing youth and adult community advocates. This presentation will share strategies and barriers faced by the DC TCP and the community catalyst grantees, as well as lessons learned from data obtained through key informant interviews, focus groups, and grantee quarterly reporting documents. This presentation will also describe efforts to develop an evaluation scheme for a cross-site evaluation that demonstrates the overall impact of the different activities the catalyst grantees engaged in.