The Mississippi Tobacco Free Coalitions are community-based coalitions that partner with schools, faith-based and community service organizations, businesses, municipalities, and a number of health advocacy organizations to:
- Prevent the initiation of tobacco use among youth,
- Reduce exposure to secondhand smoke,
- Promote tobacco cessation services,
- Eliminate tobacco-related disparities, and
- Work towards comprehensive smoke-free ordinances.
Mississippi Partnership for Comprehensive Cancer Control (MP3C) leads an integrated and coordinated approach addressing the continuum of cancer control — from prevention and detection to treatment, survivorship, and end of life care. These coalitions collect data to determine the greatest cancer-related needs in their area and develop and carry out cancer plans to meet those needs. Comprehensive Cancer Control plans include activities that:
- Encourage people to live a healthy lifestyle.
- Promote cancer screening tests.
- Increase access to good cancer care.
- Improve the quality of life for people who survive cancer.
Youth Tobacco Prevention Program Services is an activism-based initiative developed to disrupt and dissolve the tobacco industry’s targeting of vulnerable communities. The program is designed to:
- Engage one thousand youth (grades 9th-12th) in three (3) tobacco-related activities
- Educate eighty percent of tobacco retailer within 500 feet of target secondary schools on tobacco laws related to selling tobacco products to minors
- Increase targeted youth’s (grades 9th-12th) affinity toward the statewide tobacco prevention brand by twenty percent
- Reduce the cigarette use rate among high school students by one percent