Statewide Policy Advocacy Intervention in California

The No Time for Complacency Initiative

Abstract

California has made substantial progress since 1991 in reducing its teen birth rate, and its rate reduction now leads the nation. Yet more than 50,000 Californian teens continue to give birth each year, and many more became pregnant. And due to changing demographics and the recent reversal in the last decade’s poverty rate declines, California’s improvements are at risk. The No Time for Complacency (NTFC) initiative is a policy advocacy intervention designed to promote effective statewide teen pregnancy prevention policy and funding in California. This initiative employs legislative-district data analysis to provide a politically compelling organization of teen birth data, cost analyses to heighten the societal relevance of teen births, policy analysis to identify promising and effective state policies, and media advocacy to focus attention on these issues in all regions of the state. The process and results described show how it was possible to achieve impacts on state-level health policy and program funding.