home » taking action » sharing success stories Sharing Success Stories If you're participating in the Store Alert survey and have a great story about the work that you're doing, we'd love to hear about it. Please email your story, with photos if you have them, to successstories@storealert.org. We promise to read every story that comes our way and to share as many as we can on this page. Your success stories will inspire others and give us all some terrific new ideas! The Graham Alliance on Tobacco Education Since the Store Alert project is only just beginning, our first success story comes from a very similar project that's also doing great work, the Graham Alliance on Tobacco Education in Safford, Arizona. The Graham Alliance is operated out of the Mt. Graham Regional Medical Center and its Program Coordinator is Karen Doty. The Graham Alliance program focuses on youth access to tobacco products and tobacco advertising in retail stores. One of the cool things about the program is that kids are actually the ones who do the survey. When they survey a store, they work in teams of four to six, and this both eases their workload and increases the reliability of the data they collect. Each kid has unique responsibilities - some will note the location of the tobacco advertising, others will look for the actual tobacco placement, and some will chat with the store manager about youth access laws. The kids pay particular attention to tobacco products and advertising that are at child's eye level and/or near candy and toys. The Graham Alliance maintains a database of its survey results and sends letters to the merchants whose stores have been surveyed with information about the findings. According to the Graham Alliance folks, here are some of the lessons they've learned: Kids can have a much greater impact than adults when speaking with merchants around the issue of youth access to tobacco Positive reinforcement can go a long way with merchants It's helpful to maintain a database over a period of time to track changes in tobacco placement and marketing. The Graham Alliance has been doing its surveys for more than three years now. And the good news is that during that time, their program documented a decline in the number of self service displays, tobacco ads at child's eye level and tobacco displays near candy. We congratulate them on their good work and extend our thanks to them for sharing their story with us. Got your own success story you'd like to share with us? E-mail your story, with photos if you have them, to: successstories@storealert.org.
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This website is based on a website originally developed by Battelle Memorial Institute pursuant to grants from the National Cancer Institute (Grant Numbers 5R01CA086232 and 5R01CA093955). Its contents, however, are solely the responsibility of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Cancer Institute or Battelle Memorial Institute