A series of more than 1,200 town-hall meetings on underage drinking held in late March and April largely succeeded in their main goal of raising community awareness about the problem of youth alcohol use. But some organizers and participants worried that the meetings were too long on personal anecdotes and too short on specific action steps and followup.

The meetings, held in conjunction with Alcohol Awareness Month, were sponsored by the federal Interagency Coordinating Committee for the Prevention of Underage Drinking, which sponsored a pair of regional trainings to help local communities get the meetings off the ground. On the state level, the group Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free, led by governor's spouses, was instrumental in organizing the meetings, and many spouses took active roles as moderators.

Typically, meetings were designed to explore the extent of underage drinking in local communities, portraying youth alcohol use as an overlooked problem and using testimony from teens, police, educators, and others to raise awareness. Local data on underage-drinking rates often were used to back up the assertions made in informational panel discussions.

An April 24 town-hall meeting in Maine, for example, included testimony from police chiefs, state Attorney General Steven Rowe, and the Maine Office of Substance Abuse, which reported that while 83 percent of Maine parents don't think their children drink, 65 percent of their children say they have.

Joan Valenstein, co-chair of the Yorktown Coalition for Drug Free Youth in upstate New York, said about 70 people attended her March 30 town-hall meeting, including teens, judges, law-enforcement officials, politicians, school officials, and clergy. "The fact that our panel of experts were teens from our local high school encouraged other youth to come," she told Join Together. "Before the dialogue began, we stated that the purpose of the meeting was to hear and learn from the teens' perspective how they view the drinking/drugging problem in out community, and how we as adults can work with them to minimize risk factors and make Yorktown a safer place for them to flourish."

The alcohol industry also had a presence at some meetings: Diageo North America representatives took part in town halls in Castro Valley, Calif., and Richmond, Va. Organizers of a town-hall meeting in Negaunee, Mich., invited local liquor distributors to attend.

Common Themes

A number of common themes emerged from the meetings, according to an analysis by Join Together based on feedback from 92 town-hall participants from 35 states. These included the need for:

• parents to be involved and take responsibility for preventing youth drinking
  
• more parents and students to be educated about the legal consequences of drinking
  
• more youth activities as an alternative to drinking
  
• greater awareness about the deadly effects of alcohol
  
• changing social perceptions about youth drinking
  
• providing boundaries for youth
  
• addressing the problem of parents providing alcohol to youth

In Hawaii, for example, Lt. Gov. James Aiona spoke at a March 28 town-hall meeting in Waipahu and urged parents to talk to their young children about alcohol. "By the time parents confront their children about their addiction, it will be too late," he said.

During a meeting in Midland, Texas, Nicole Holt, executive director of Texans Standing Tall, stressed that underage drinking is as much an adult problem as a youth problem, because alcohol is created and marketed by adults. She called for accountability from both adult providers of alcohol and the community at large, including the alcohol industry.

"Parental responsibility ... is the issue the alcohol industry puts out, it's the message we all hear and the one we tend to fall back on," Holt told Join Together. "I think that stuff is good, but parents aren't the only ones providing kids with alcohol."

In Washington, D.C., a meeting organized by the local Safe and Drug-Free Communities Coalition included a youth panel that called for better enforcement of underage-drinking laws -- including license suspensions for repeat offenders -- as well as for schools to treat alcohol like a drug and refer young drinkers to treatment.

A number of the town-hall meetings succeeded in generating broad community interest: two local TV stations covered a March 28 meeting held in Albuquerque, N.M., led by first lady Barbara Richardson, for example, and the event was front-page news in some local papers. Another New Mexico meeting, in Los Alamos, drew about 200 attendees, and 125 people signed in for the Washington, D.C. meeting.

In Oregon, part of the town-hall meeting in Beaverton was slated to air on Fox TV as part of a news special called "Underage Drinking: Oregon's Hidden Crisis," produced with the Oregon Partnership.

Need for Followup

The town-hall meetings were not without their flaws, however. Some participants said there was too much attention paid to parents and youth and not enough discussion about the responsibility of the alcohol industry or environmental prevention -- such as restricting the number of alcohol sellers in communities and raising alcohol taxes to discourage youth purchases -- that also could help prevent underage drinking.

According to the feedback compiled by Join Together, other common complaints included:

• too much emphasis on punishment rather than treatment
  
• low attendance
  
• meetings were too political
  
• lack of a solid action plan
  
• too much personal testimony

"Most of the 'next steps' involved creating task forces, scheduling additional town-hall meetings, and taking the town-hall meetings to smaller communities," Eric Helmuth, director of internet strategy and communications at Join Together, noted. "Only two people mentioned an action plan that involved working with state governments to change laws; both are working to increase the consequences for parents who host parties and for youth caught in possession of alcohol." 

Some organizers said that focusing on raising awareness made sense from a local perspective. "People have to know about the problem before they can be motivated to do something about it," said Valenstein. "There were audible gasps when kids said drinking is just part of our life. Parents were awakened from a deep sleep. The kids really told it like it was."

Dennis O. Romero, acting director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) -- which provided communities with $1,000 grants to underwrite the meetings -- said that of the 335 meeting attendees who submitted feedback forms to the agency, 86.3 percent liked the information they received, and 76.4 percent said the meetings were well planned.

Romero described the meetings as a "first step" toward moving communities to action. "It's money well spent when you bring the major stakeholders together to discuss a single issue," he told Join Together. Romero said CSAP continues to gather feedback on the meetings and would like to see communities use the agency's Strategic Prevention Framework as a guide for followup action, although he stressed, "Communities need to be in the position to decide what the local priorities are."

Reports gathered by Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free showed that some communities had a broader focus than others. In Fremont, Calif., for example, state Sen. Liz Figueroa discussed her bill to crack down on the marketing, advertising, and taxation of so-called 'alcopops' -- sweet malt beverages that critics say are marketed to children. At the town hall meeting held in Decatur, Ind., organizers passed around a copy of Join Together's "Get Serious" petition, which calls on lawmakers to take action against alcohol-related problems.

In Oklahoma, a survey of town-hall participants is now being used to support action on issues such as increased use of public-service announcements on underage drinking, youth prevention, and increased penalties for retailers who sell to youth.

Texans Standing Tall actually is holding a series of five regional town-hall meetings; the event in Midland included an introduction to the brain research on addiction, an overview of regional data, and information on prevention strategies like keg registration. Participants were then broken into small groups to brainstorm on possible next steps and to set target dates for achieving goals. "It's a disservice to educate people and then not give them an outlet to do something about it," said Holt.

"Unless people who do these town halls use them as a catalyst to follow up, it's just a waste," agreed Emilio Williams, project manager of the Safe and Drug-Free Communities Coalition of Washington, D.C. Williams said that the D.C. town hall meeting will be followed by outreach to local college communities to address binge drinking, among other efforts.