December & January Updates from the Network

We routinely prepare a report highlighting our recent activities for the Fenway board and we always like to copy it here as “Updates”… so hold on for a fast romp on what we’ve been up to the last two months!

December/January Updates from the Network for LGBT Health Equity

The Network started December with a flurry of travel. Scout and our Steering Committee Past President, Dr. Francisco Buchting first represented us at a small Legacy Foundation funded meeting of tobacco disparity leaders brainstorming how to move our combined impact up several notches. It’s great to work with disparity leaders outside the LGBT world. We came up with several new strategies, so look for action from that convening soon.

Directly after, Scout and Gustavo went to Atlanta to attend the National Partners Meeting and a meeting of the tobacco disparity networks. We had many constructive discussions at these meetings, including extra meetings that were set up with Dr. Ursula Bauer (about LGBT inclusion in Prevention Fund work) and with the surveillance people at CDC and National Center for Health Statistics (about reintroducing trans data collection to the adult tobacco survey). Overall – there are some very promising signs of better integration of disparity work on many levels. Dr. Buchting again joined us for the last part of this trip as Office of Smoking & Health staff helped us set up our first ever CDC-wide training on our new MPOWERED best practices document. The training was received very well!

Next week we were off again, this time to DC for the multi-part LGBT spotlight engineered by the American Legacy Foundation. They’ve got a great new video that several of us helped with, and a new report on LGBT smoking, and we were so pleased to work with HRC and other old friends at their Warner Series lecture and live webcast that evening. Be sure to catch Scout’s Huffington Post blog on it all: It’s Time for the LGBT Communities to be Such Easy Targets for the Tobacco Industry. Note also the second installment from our friend the head of Bilerico.com, Bil Browning. Not only was he in the Legacy video, but he continued posting publicly about his cessation journey, which this month took a hard twist. Overall, we’re very pleased to report the Legacy rollout heralded our most active week of LGBT media on tobacco control in our history, with at least eight articles in national and local LGBT media!

We were very pleased to see January start with the exciting news of NIH rolling out their long-awaited response to the IOM LGBT report, including notably, the news that only 1.4% of their LGBT portfolio is tobacco research. The very next week, we had our first Huffington Post piece go up about LGBT targeting in the $100M Tips from Former Smokers Campaign. This is targeting that we advocated strongly to get, and we expect this to be just the beginning. The very day that post came out, Dr. Scoutwas again down at HHS Secty. Sebelius’ office providing input on what we’d like HHS to prioritize for the coming years’ LGBT action plan. More details on what we said soon, but you know we definitely asked for more funded LGBT tobacco research! Midmonth we helped promote the joint action alert about collecting LGBT data in clinical settings. Finally, we are rounding out the month by announcing our three great blogging scholarship recipients for Creating Change this week and getting ready to head down to Atlanta for that preeminent LGBT leadership convening. Each year we roll out a big community engagement event at Creating Change (see examples here & here), so watch our blog both for live event reports from the blogging scholars and to hear what new community engagement strategy we’re rolling out this year!

(p.s. Thanks for catching the errors Naph!)