Advocacy Assignment
csulbstudent21
SampleTalkingPointsupdated8-28-19.docxTALKING POINTS WHEN ADVOCATING FOR PRESERVATION OF CCG
Advocating for: Restore $20,000,000 in funding for the Community Challenge Grants program, which has had enormous success and has played a major role in reducing the teen birth rate in California.
TALKING POINTS/FACTS (Based on Research) You must use the library research sites
• The Community Challenge Grant program (CCG), administered by the Teen Pregnancy Prevention division of the Office of Family Planning, is one of the most successful prevention programs in the state. Data and evaluation results indicate a major impact on teen pregnancy rates, making it the lowest teen pregnancy rate California has seen in decades. Great progress has been made but much more work on these issues remains (Office of Family Planning [OFP], 2018).
• At least fifty percent of teen mothers do not finish high school. Eliminating CCG teen pregnancy prevention funding will increase the drop‐out rate, leading to a less prepared workforce and a poorer education system (Brunner, 2017).
• Cutting dollars for teen pregnancy prevention does not save money. For every dollar spent on teen pregnancy prevention, California saves $3.75 dollars on intervention, such as health care for
pregnant teens and their babies and public assistance to support families of teen parents (Johnson, 2018). This figure does not include social costs, such as the cost of a less prepared workforce due to parenting teens not completing high school, societal problems related to teen parenting such as academic challenges for children born to teen parents, and dealing with delinquency, which is higher among children of teen parents (Johnson, 2018).
• Teen pregnancy rates in California and the U.S. are still unacceptably high, and the community needs to maintain a strong focus on this issue to ensure that all California teens have the opportunity to complete their education and attain their goals (Brunner, 2017).
• California has been the leader in the Nation when it comes to teen pregnancy prevention, largely because of the flexible, community‐oriented approach taken in the past by the Office of Family Planning. Community Challenge Grants fund programs that are tailored to a community, allowing for maximum effectiveness (OFP, 2019).
• Programs funded by the Community Challenge Grant program include many after‐school and
leadership development programs. Because of this, their elimination would also affect crime rates, high school drop‐out rates, and more (OFP, 2019).
• Loss of these services will derail a decade of hard work resulting in higher teen birth rates! Creating more fatherless households is not going to improve California’s recession (OFP, 2019).
•The United States has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and births in the western industrialized world. Teen pregnancy costs the United States at least $7 billion annually (CDC, 2018).
•Nearly four in ten young women become pregnant at least once before they reach the age of twenty—nearly one million a year. Eight in ten of these pregnancies are unintended and 79 percent are to unmarried teens (Johnson, 2018).
•The younger a teenaged girl is when she has sex for the first time, the more likely she is to have had unwanted or non-voluntary sex. Close to four in ten girls who had first intercourse at 13 or 14 report it was either non-voluntary or unwanted (Brunner, 2018).
References
