Evolvement® is a national award-winning youth movement empowering teens to work toward meaningful change in their communities.
Since 2004, Evolvement has contributed tangible results towards restricting flavored tobacco products, reducing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption, passing a tobacco retail license ordinance, and more. As active participants in various advocacy campaigns, Evolvement youth have shown that their time, talent, and voices can have a powerful impact on health in their communities.
Evolvement is an initiative by Rescue, a behavior change marketing agency. Rescue works with government and nonprofit clients to implement Evolvement as part of comprehensive behavior change strategies. Specifically, Evolvement activates the power of local youth leaders to contribute meaningfully and tangibly to behavior change programs through policy change and/or health education, while providing leadership and skill building to youth members. Effective youth engagement can:
- Generate and amplify public support
- Change public opinion
- Garner the support of key decision-makers
- Drive earned media
- Help to successfully change public health policies
- Give youth a voice and meaningful role in improving the health of their communities
“Youth activists have the power to make a change in tobacco policies. We are not the future of a better world, but the present.” - Maura, Evolvement Denver Youth
An Award-Winning Youth Engagement Model
Rescue has developed the Evolvement model based on over a decade of experience engaging youth in public health across the US and Canada, including programs in Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Missouri, Alberta, Louisiana and Colorado. Evolvement recruits and trains thousands of teens every year to be agents of change in their communities and has adapted and evolved its programs to new standards based on youth feedback and program effectiveness.
This ability to build upon compound experiences from multiple locations has allowed Rescue to develop youth engagement strategies that adhere to the CDC’s Best Practices for Youth Engagement while setting new standards for achieving impactful policy results with youth leaders. This is one reason why youth in all four of Rescue’s most recent youth engagement programs have received Youth Advocate of the Year Awards from the global Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
How It Works
Rescue gives government agencies and nonprofits the opportunity to establish a local Evolvement program with the infrastructure and best practices of the national Evolvement model.
Since Evolvement already exists as a national youth movement working on a host of public health issues, clients don’t have to go through the costly process of creating a new program from scratch. Whether you want to launch a new youth engagement effort or revamp an existing program, Rescue can implement Evolvement locally on your behalf, becoming your resident Youth Engagement Department. As a true full-service partner, Rescue recruits youth, conducts youth trainings, manages partners and mini-grants, guides youth involvement, and reports on process evaluation measures. Plus, clients can use the Evolvement brand or their own program name when implementing the Evolvement model.
Part of the unique value of the model is the use of existing high school clubs to expose rising youth leaders to public health issues. Each Evolvement program partners with local clubs, such as Key Club or DECA, to cost-efficiently establish Evolvement partners throughout a city or state. Over the past 10+ years, Evolvement has formed partnerships with hundreds of clubs, granting them much needed funds to do their work, while empowering their members to cause change.
Once teens are trained on the Evolvement model, they contribute to a specific public health campaign of the client’s choosing, which harnesses community-wide or statewide energy and on-the-ground work to achieve a single, attainable campaign goal. These campaigns ensure youth efforts are coordinated and contribute in meaningful and quantifiable ways toward change in their community. For more on what Evolvement does, check out Evolvement in action.