Breakout Sessions
2023 TNSTRONG Summit Breakout Sessions
Building a Coalition; How to Engage & Empower Your Peers - Jamie Kent
In this interactive breakout session, you'll learn the ins and outs of building your own coalition to fight back against big tobacco! How do you develop a fun campaign that brings people together and gets your friends excited about becoming advocates? How do you turn it from an idea into a reality? Come to this action-packed session and find out!
Hidden in Plain Sight – Interactive Activity & Educational Presentation - Robyn Russell & Chelsea White
A mock teen bedroom discovery presentation makes the perfect interactive current drug trends presentation for parents and professionals. Everything that you need for a dynamic, interactive presentation to educate about how young people can conceal their alcohol, vaping, and other drug use.
TRUTH - Bryan Coleman & Youth Person
This interactive breakout session will provide participants with insight into the most urgent and often overlooked tobacco-related issues impacting the environment. We will explore how predominantly communities of color and low-income communities that are underrepresented in the policy or decision-making process can build awareness among peers and community members. Lastly, participants will learn about several ways they can implement Truth’s environmental campaign in their activism efforts.
Jason Michaels Magic
Expanding on his #DOTHEIMPOSSIBLE: RESILIENCE keynote, Jason will guide attendees through interactive exercises designed to help them identify and quickly overcome the unexpected challenges that we face on an almost daily basis.
Not Just Vapor--What Parents Need to Know - PAVe
Your child is likely already exposed to vaping, whether through media or watching other kids. With usage high among middle and high schoolers, it's critical to start the conversation early and keep communication open. Your child probably won't tell you if they start vaping. E-cigarette companies won't tell your child that behind the bright colors and sweet flavors are harmful chemicals and nicotine addiction. Join PAVe (Parents Against Vaping e-cigarettes) for everything that parents, and adults who work with youth, need to know to help kids avoid or quit using dangerous flavored e-cigarettes.
Adverse Childhood Experiences; Connecting Tobacco to Trauma - Jill Murphy
Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, are stressful or traumatic experiences, such as abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction, that disrupt the safe, stable, nurturing environments that children need to thrive. Building Strong Brains works to change the culture of Tennessee so that the state's overarching philosophy, policies, programs, and practices for children, youth, and young adults utilize the latest brain science to prevent and mitigate the impact of adverse childhood experiences.
Health Equity - Dr. Gregory Bolden
The session will focus on youth advocacy, PUP laws, tobacco-free school policies, and peer-to-peer education. The session will provide some key elements that address how young people can build capacity and advocate for changes that will both protect their health and resist the targeting of both the tobacco industry and the political system. It will also provide tools for peer-to-peer education and cross-cultural collaboration leading to direct positive interventions.
Messaging Matters: Storytelling for Change; Tobacco Free Kids (TFK)
Many of these TNSTRONG Youth have a general understanding of the tobacco control landscape and the extent of the problem we tackle. Knowing that we wanted to provide a session that will have youth:
Learn how to use their own stories and how tobacco has affected them to develop relatable, clear, concise messages that will resonate with their target audiences and activate action in your community. This training will have a particular focus on the importance of storytelling and how it enhances their message in both tobacco control and their advocacy as a whole.
Powerful and Purposeful Networking - M&P Presentations
Topics Covered:
· Social Media Networking Skills
· In-Person Networking Skills
· Personal Marketing Skills
· Gathering Inspiration from Others
· Giving Inspiration to Others
Matt and Phil bring an interactive approach to looking into the power of networking and how it can professionally springboard and energize us all. While discussing proven virtual and in-person networking strategies that M&P use, the participants will experience and reflect on them firsthand; meeting others to boost creativity, support, and energy. It's time to collaborate, network, and energize our best professional selves!
TNSTRONG Youth Ambassadors
First-Hand Experience as a TNSTRONG Ambassador: This session will highlight our experience as a TNSTRONG Ambassador and explain why we would love to have others join us in our fight against nicotine. An interactive will be done to show the dangers of nicotine.
Life Maze is a role-playing game that teaches real-life consequences. The maze serves to aid the students in realizing how their choices impact their future. Students begin the maze by drawing random situations that depict choices that involve alcohol, drugs, sex, and other risky behaviors such as tobacco, texting and driving, vandalism, and bullying. Some of the consequences are based on healthy choices; some are on unhealthy choices.
Depending on situations and consequences are randomly drawn, students work their way through the maze visiting various stations, manned by community professionals. The situations drawn may lead to the pregnancy clinic, counseling, emergency medical services, arrest (with toy handcuffs and a 'mock', unlocked jail), wedding day, STD clinic, military career, domestic violence, educational outcomes, banking and finance, and/or healthy relationships. Role-play will occur at these stations with professionals. This role-play does not involve actual testing of any kind.
It is our hope that students participating in the Life Maze learn the emotional, physical, and financial consequences of their choices.