Youth advocacy for local community health policies

The Youth Leadership Institute (YLI) partners with youth and adults for healthier communities by creating positive changes in a number of areas, including increasing community access to healthy foods, and decreasing youth access to alcohol and tobacco. This presentation highlights YLI's partnerships with young people on community health policy advocacy in the areas of healthy food access, and alcohol and tobacco access.

This presentation will examine the following questions: 1) How can youth be supported to engage in community health policy advocacy? 2) What do youth contribute to community health policy advocacy? Specifically, the presentation will highlight successful examples of youth-led food, alcohol, and tobacco policy work and discuss how youth were engaged and supported; the specific strategies implemented by youth; how youth engagement in policy work leads to process and outcomes that are unique compared to adult-led efforts; and how young people interact with adults in policy work (ex. which strategies do youth groups implement relatively independently and for which strategies do they partner with existing community coalitions?).

The challenges and strengths of using youth-adult partnerships on policies for healthier communities will be highlighted. Also presented will be lessons learned and recommendations for other communities that want to utilize youth-adult partnerships for food, alcohol, and tobacco policy work.