WASHINGTON – The National Youth Advocacy Coalition has received a one-year award of $100,000 from the American Legacy Foundation through its Legacy Innovative Grants program to create a national tobacco working group, the agency announced today. The working group will target young adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning or intersex (LGBTQI).
The National LGBTQI Young Adult Tobacco Working Group will develop a tobacco needs assessment that will be administered to young adults (ages 18-24) across the country this fall and winter. Results from the survey will be compiled in the spring of 2010 and will be released along with policy and programmatic recommendations that are based on the findings.
“Tobacco use continues to be extraordinarily high among LGBTQI young adults and this is happening, in part, because tobacco companies continue to target them,” said Isaiah Webster III, director of communications and special projects for NYAC. “There are sufficient indications that tobacco use is a huge problem within the LGBTQI community, but organizations have always looked for better data. The working group will be able to help organizations tailor tobacco prevention and cessation programs to met the challenges in their communities.”
Organizations that are interested in participating in either the working group or in administering the survey to young adults, should contact Jennie Beeson, program associate for NAYC, at jennie@nyacyouth.org.
The working group will also be bringing together tools, trends, and best practices related to tobacco prevention and cessation for LGBTQI young adults. According to Webster, links to those resources will be announced later through NYAC’s Web site at www.nyacyouth.org.
The National Youth Advocacy Coalition (NYAC), founded in 1993, is a social justice organization that advocates for and with young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ) in an effort to end discrimination against these youth and to ensure their physical and emotional well-being.
