The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: Youth respond best to an anti-industry focused prevention message as opposed to a health message. Youth also need to be engaged regularly in education and advocacy in order to sustain a statewide anti-tobacco movement. On-line Anti Tobacco Advocacy Kits (ATAK) were developed to provide anti-industry focused, user friendly resources, tools and activities to youth. ATAK Online allows SWAT clubs or individual members that have suffered recently from significant budget reductions and now operating with limited adult support to continue education and advocacy efforts in their schools and local communities.

Methods: Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) youth developed ATAK Online, a toolkit calling youth advocates into action on 10 different tobacco control issues. ATAK Online provides advocates with the education and prepared actions needed to continue fighting the tobacco industry including action steps, power point presentations, reproducible counter-marketing materials and a resource list. Each issue gives users a brief issue overviews and in-depth research including quotes and excerpts from tobacco industry documents.

Results: Users are tracked using a system counting the number of hits to the advocacy page and number of documents downloaded. Users are also given the opportunity to post evaluative comments that will help others use each idea and help SWAT improve their online approach. Launch date for the ATAK Online page is February 1, 2006. With limited field staff, SWAT aims to increase youth involvement in SWAT movement and increase community exposure to the anti-tobacco message with the availability of these one-stop advocacy packages.