Targeted public education campaigns with clear policy goals and widespread support have tremendous potential to reframe policy debates.

Over the years, TCWF has funded multimillion-dollar grants for several high-profile public education campaigns to inform and educate policymakers and opinion leaders on the issues of youth violence, teen pregnancy, health access and tobacco control. 

Both our Violence Prevention Initiative (VPI) and our Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative (TPPI) have significant public education campaign components. The campaigns reframed the issues of violence against youth and teen pregnancy in order to change the focus of the public debate and lay the groundwork for the policy changes being sought. When the VPI was launched, youth violence was perceived as a criminal justice matter. The overall message of the VPI is that violence against youth is preventable and best addressed as a public health problem. The first VPI public education campaign focused on youth as victims of violence rather than just the perpetrators. The central message of the public education campaign was: handguns are the leading cause of death for California’s youth. The public policy solution was: restrict access to handguns. Reframing the issue in this manner was critical to the Initiative’s grantees’ successful efforts to inform policymakers about the need to ban the sale of Saturday night specials in communities throughout California.

In the case of the TPPI, the goal has been to shift the perception of teen pregnancy as an individual and family problem to viewing it as also an adult and societal problem. The message of TPPI is that without a realistic approach to teen pregnancy, prevention efforts will not be as successful as they might be. TPPI’s current “Get Real About Teen Pregnancy” campaign focuses on encouraging adults to get involved in the lives of teenagers and learn ways that they can help solve the problem of teen pregnancy. The policy goals are to improve sex education and increase access to contraceptives. The Get Real campaign was cited by a legislator as a factor in the passage of his bill requiring that sex education classes provide information that is medically up-to-date and free of racial, ethnic and gender bias. 

It is important to note that these campaigns were part of multifaceted policy efforts including community organizing and local and state advocacy. When we first embarked on the public education campaign strategy, we did not realize the galvanizing effect it would have on the other grantees in the initiatives, particularly the community-based groups. Because of the campaigns, grantees felt that they were part of something much larger, part of a movement, which helped energize them and kept them focused. 

Outside of the initiatives, our public education campaigns have focused on informing policymakers and opinion leaders about the health implications of proposed public policies. We funded a $4 million grant for a public education project designed to increase the awareness and knowledge of Californians on the merits, background and potential consequences of a state ballot measure, Proposition 188.6 According to a nonpartisan study, Proposition 188 would have had the effect of weakening tobacco control laws throughout the state, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in increased health care costs. Our policy goal was to make sure that the voters understood both sides of the debate before casting a vote. The campaign took no position, pro or con, on the measure; it simply laid out the facts as they appeared in the ballot pamphlet.7 These facts included who funded the Proposition, which was a list of tobacco companies, and those who were listed as opposing the measure, which included the American Lung Association of California and the American Heart Association’s California affiliate. The campaign also urged voters to read their ballot pamphlets before voting on Proposition 188. The grantee strictly avoided any contact with the proponents and opponents of the Proposition so no one could charge that the grantee had coordinated its strategy with any partisan purpose. The week before the public education campaign, polls showed the measure winning. Within a week of the campaign’s launch, the numbers reversed and Proposition 188 ended up losing 70 percent to 30 percent, a huge defeat for the tobacco industry, which put $35 million into trying to pass the Proposition.

While this was a large grant for the Foundation, the payoff in savings to the state in health care costs that would not be incurred was huge. This grant was also one of our most controversial. The tobacco industry tried to challenge the ads, but because we had done our legal homework and were within our legal bounds, the challenge was unsuccessful.

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