Name: Jacob Zychick. Title: Community Advocacy Director- Philadelphia. Organization: American Heart Association

Transcription

1 Name: Jacob Zychick Title: Community Advocacy Director- Philadelphia Organization: American Heart Association Street Address: 1617 JFK BLVD Suite #700 City, State, Zip: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Name: Cresha Auck Title: Ohio Community Advocacy Director Organization: American Heart Association Street Address: 5455 North Hight Street City, State, Zip: Columbus, Ohio

2 On January 1 st, 2017 the Philadelphia sugar beverage tax (SBT) went into effect. Hailed as a tremendous victory by health advocates and its supporters, the tax would positively affect the lives of over 1.5 million Philadelphians. The Philadelphia tax would help decrease consumption of sugary drinks while funding the mayor s new initiative known as Rebuild. Funds raised from the tax along with private contributions would lead to nearly $500 million invested towards the city s parks, recreation centers, community schools, libraries, and pre-k programs. As supporters celebrated, the opposition, led by the Pennsylvania Food Merchants Association (PFMA), was already having conversations with members of the Pennsylvania House and Senate to support state interference, or better known as preemption. In late 2017, staff at the American Heart Association received confirmation that one member of the House and one member of the Senate were sharing co-sponsorship memorandums with their colleagues to preempt the Philadelphia sugary beverage tax and stop similar SBTs in the commonwealth. Our goal was to build coalition and grassroots/tops in opposition to preemption of the Philadelphia tax. Early in our efforts the two primary challenges that we faced were properly framing this issue to a wider audience outside of Philadelphia and being able to educate our advocates on the topic of preemption. Using our previous experiences in the tobacco control battles and with the Pennsylvania legislator, we believed that our best chance to defeat preemption was to make this not specifically about Philadelphia s tax but more so about the state taking away power from local governments. In Pennsylvania like in many other states, there continues to be a Philadelphia against the rest of the commonwealth attitude among elected officials -and residents. With over 2,000 municipalities in the commonwealth and 203 representatives in the PA House, our most successful messaging was that House Bill 2241, the bill to preempt the tax, would look to strip away local governments decision-making abilities that positively affect their communities. Rarely, if ever, in that messaging did we focus on the tax; instead, we spoke more in generalizations about healthy initiatives and the ability of local decision makers to meet the challenges and needs of their residents. We believed that in the state capital, this issue needed to be framed as a big business vs. the common people issue, similar to ones found in campaign finance reform. To do that, we needed a coalition outside of the American Heart Association to push our message. Using polling that was commissioned by the AHA we decided upon the name 71Pennsylvania, which came from the fact that over 71% of Pennsylvanians supported local control and opposed preemption. The coalition branding and messaging would be used in weekly legislative drop-offs, district office mailers, and social media graphics. Consistently framing this topic as over 71% of Pennsylvanians are opposed to preemption and believe that their local government should not lose its power to what is in the best interest of their community. Advocates at the American Heart Association are terrific individuals who have done tremendous work in supporting CPR in schools, smoke-free workplaces, and in support of tobacco control. For nearly all our terrific advocates in Pennsylvania, preemption was a new and complicated topic. They struggled personally, and sometimes professionally, to understand the organization s stake in the issue. Engaging our board members and key volunteers became critically important to increasing advocate support and community spokespeople. Specific strategies included trainings, educational efforts and series messaging. This also helped us navigate challenging business relationships of our volunteers with the beverage association. Using our messaging on local control, we went out to identify and recruit new organizations that would join the 71Pennsylvania coalition and work with the AHA to defeat preemption. These organizations

3 included Moms Rising, Center for Science and in the Public Interest (CSPI), Pennsylvania Municipal League (PML), Sierra Club, League of Conversation Voters of Pennsylvania, American Diabetes Association, and numerous organizations focused in-support of high-quality early education funding. These organizations had different backgrounds and reasons to oppose preemption, but we continued as a group to push the messaging that House Bill 2241 would look to strip away local governments of their decision-making abilities. In 3 months, these organizations along with the American Heart Association had over 2,000 Pennsylvanians take direct targeted action in opposition to HB 2241 and in support of local control. As the legislative calendar has come to an end in Pennsylvania we are proud to share out that we have defeated House Bill 2241, that the Senate bill never materialized, and that we have continued to educate our advocates on preemption. We expect our opposition to push forward a new preemption bill in 2019 and are using what we accomplished and learned to be more effective in defeating their efforts next legislative session. What have we learned? First, preemption must be included in all early campaign planning for any issue and in conversations with volunteers, staff, and partners. The threat of preemption must be assessed with an understanding that we can not celebrate a victory until a defeat of preemption. When drafting messaging, budgets, or in-general strategies, preemption needs to be included to ensure not being too late to defeat it. In discussing preemption, we must begin to educate our advocates and partners on how it works, when has it been used, who will most likely support it, and beginning to collaborate with like-minded organizations who have defeated preemption on bills specific to them. Second, local control is the messaging that we had used repeatedly on this campaign. From the district office mailers, social media graphics, legislative drop-offs, and post cards signed by supporters. Organizations also opposed to the bill used local control messaging with the caveat of the topic that they are focused on such as the environment or local municipalities governance. From our efforts in Pennsylvania, we believe that local control is how this topic of preemption should be discussed but it is important to have different organizations sharing that messaging too. Lastly, we had learned that coordinated targeted efforts were important to our victory 2018 and will need to be expanded upon to be victorious in The coalition and its partners honest and open dialogue about strengths and weaknesses led to each organization doing what led to the greatest impact for the capacity they could lend while targeted representatives they had a prior strong relationship with. Targeted patch-in calls from legislative district constituents not associated directly with any organization added even more perspective to the support of local control, while ensuring a pre-selected number of calls was achieved each day without relying solely on volunteer efforts. Those calls in coordination with other efforts led to continued pressure on targeted representatives. A targeted grassroots effort featuring different perspectives, framing the topic as big business vs. the common person, and expanding the audience from Philadelphia to over 2,000 local municipalities made us successful in our opposition to preemption. Our challenges moving forward will to expand our coalition, continue to educate our advocates on preemption, and keep all involved motivated and excited for this defeating preemption in year two of their attempts.

4 Figure 1Karen Showalter of Moms Rising helped distribute legislative drop-offs to each member of the House and Senate. These efforts were done weekly by the coalition.

5 Figure 2Graphic used on Facebook to showcase supporters signing postcards in Scranton, PA during the AHA Heart Walk. Northeast PA had some of the best polling in support of local control and opposed to preemption in any geographic region in PA.