Empower Pack: Empowering Arizona Youth to Make Informed Healthy Decisions

Audience: The group mostly likely to benefit from this lecture is those who work directly with youth in terms of education, outreach and collaboration. Anyone in the social marketing field will also benefit as the messaging and execution are key to affecting a behavioral change in the youth. This can be translated to any audience.

Key Points: Empowerment is more powerful than telling youth what is right or wrong. Interactivity engages the youth, upbeat “catchy” music reinforces the message, skit intro gives youth “permission” to be engaged and sets ground rules, end Q&A solidifies messaging while endorsing the arts, booklets continue messaging beyond skit to classroom and/or home, contest allows youth to finalize what they learn by completing the end to the story via writing, music or drawing. Additional logistical key points include successful partnership between different agencies and programs to create an educational tool, community relationship building providing free shows to Title 1 schools and lessons learned regarding logistical support and planning.

Educational Experience: The audience will learn via lecture of lessons learned, presenting research involving empowerment success and demonstration (skit excerpts) to show how the musical skit engages and empowers youth.

Benefits: The audience will benefit by seeing how a different approach is sometimes needed to reach youth as traditional messaging can become stagnant and ineffective in terms of approach and execution. They will see the benefits of empowerment in terms of the youth holding themselves accountable in making the “right” decisions concerning nutrition, physical activity and tobacco use.