Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare (BRBH), a community services board based in the Roanoke Valley, has received VFHY funding since 2002 to support youth tobacco use prevention efforts. VFHY funds their facilitation of Too Good For Drugs, an evidence-based prevention program, in Roanoke County Title 1 elementary schools.  

In January 2024, BRBH partnered with the Salem Prevention Planning Team and media company mpiTOO to expand their prevention efforts into the community. They collaborated with high school students participating in a service-learning program at Salem High School to create vaping prevention videos and graphics. These messages were aired on television screens at Salem High throughout the school day.  

Youth vaping is a major public health issue across the United States including in the Roanoke region – the 2021 Virginia Youth Survey found that 21.6% of high schoolers in Southwest Virginia used e-cigarettes, compared with 14.3% of high schoolers statewide.  

Furthermore, vaping prevention is an important cause to the youth involved with this project. “It was abundantly clear that [vaping] was something that they were seeing within their school, this is something that they see within their age range, and they were very passionate about it,” said Makayla James, a Prevention and Wellness Specialist at BRBH.  

One major lesson BRBH learned is to keep an open mind and let youth lead the way. The project was so impactful because the young participants were trusted with a lot of responsibility and created prevention messaging they knew would resonate with their peers.   

“As an adult, we always think we know what needs to be said, or what youth need to hear, and that’s not always the truth… I’ve definitely learned that working with youth can help reach audiences in a way that traditionally I wouldn’t have been able to,” James said.  

As the project came to a close, James solicited honest feedback from the student participants to incorporate in future work.  

BRBH also found success by meeting youth where they were: at school. Working through the service-learning program at Salem High School gave BRBH and the Salem Prevention Planning Team a built-in time during the school day to meet with students. James noted that she sometimes had to rearrange her own workday to accommodate the students’ class times, but it was important to her to work around their schedule.

After the campaign at Salem High School proved successful, BRBH and the youth participants set their sights on the wider community. They used VFHY funding to create a series of social media and bus ads targeted to 18 to 24-year-olds that ran throughout the Roanoke Valley. 

Between the social media and bus ads, the campaign generated nearly 1,663,000 impressions in May and June 2024. Public response to the project was positive, with community members expressing excitement at seeing the youth-designed work and appreciating that “their voices [and] their creativity,” drove the campaign.  

Moving forward, BRBH hopes to apply the lessons they learned during this project to their other work with kids and teens and find more opportunities to engage youth voices in prevention efforts.