LA County Policy Adoption Model

Policy Adoption Model – LA Meeting

Here’s a quick update about our LA Meeting: Alan and I met with Christi Li, LA Co. Health Department Policy Coordinator and Rachel Tyree, Director of the LA Co. CPPW Mentoring Program. Linda Aragon couldn’t join us because among other things, their CTG grant was up for approval in front of the LA County Board.

It’s clear, their life is just as crazy as ours, keeping up with CPPW and CTG demands.

We had a slightly rough start, but a gorgeous meeting room, beautiful weather, and awesome food. Who couldn’t be productive? Here’s what we got done in a few short hours (you can see us at work via Flickr).

• We mapped out the entire content and a rough timeline for creating an online package to showcase LA County’s brilliantly executed 5-phase model for policy change (the Policy Adoption Model).
• We conferenced in one of our CDC project officers, Nadine Doyle, to report our progress
• We introduced Christi and Rachel to Ian Shive, of Tandem Stills + Motion, who, thankfully, will be shooting, editing, and bringing in a web designer to actually produce the project (alleluia…did you hear angels sing?). They all seemed to really hit it off …(Ian has done much advocacy around parks, has even testified in front of congress, so he totally gets policy, which LA greatly appreciated…). You can check out Ian’s work here
• Finally, we conferenced in Linda to update her on progress.
  

At the end of the day, all parties were impressed with how much we accomplished, engaged and ready to meet our incredibly ambitious timeline of showcasing this as one of the Mentoring Community successes at the February 7 Annual CPPW meeting in Atlanta. No pressure there.

We then donned t-shirts, hopped in the car and Christi drove us through LA to a city council meeting in Compton (South LA) -- after a quick tutorial on how to effectively interact (or not) with gang members. Happy to report the city council passed the first reading of a Multi-unit housing and outdoor smokefree area ordinance. The PAM model at work!

I am super passionate about this story not only because their model is so successful (look at their stats, and they have never lost a campaign).

In addition, this story is significant because these are the proverbial roots of our nation’s tobacco control movement … Prop 99 and California’s work to implement it, led the nation.