Advancing Community Prevention by Educating Key Policymakers to Ensure Sustainability

During this time of health care system transformation, many significant opportunities exist to advance community-based prevention and must be successfully leveraged in order to adequately address the social determinants of health. Several strides have been made with efforts like the Prevention & Public Health Fund and National Prevention Strategy. However, there are also setbacks and distortions of successful efforts that challenge sustainability of these efforts.  Educating policymakers and cultivating legislative champions for these efforts is critically important to ensuring community-based prevention remains a priority.

The Trust for America’s Health has garnered support for the Prevention Fund from over 800 national and state organizations that include a broad range of multi-sector stakeholders including business, education, faith-based, hospitals, providers, among a variety of others. We have mobilized these supporters in various ways including advocacy days in Washington, DC, in-district meetings in key states, op-eds, letters to the editor, etc. 

This presentation will showcase some key examples of efforts to educate lawmakers that can be adapted to ensure stronger support for community-based prevention efforts.

Key issues covered include:

1. Describe strategies for building support for community-based prevention by cultivating relationships with nontraditional partners and engaging them in policymaker education;
2. Discuss successful practices for engaging supporters in results-oriented education of key policymakers that includes examples of making the case/telling the story of how community prevention makes a difference in health outcomes;
3. Identify essential ingredients needed to cultivate relationships with policymakers to ensure long-term sustainability of efforts.