Evolvement ❘ Promoting a tobacco-free New Mexico

Hello, My name is Finn Anderson, and I am a junior at Portales high school and this was my first year doing Evolvement.I joined Evolvement to help stop the usage of drugs and tobacco in New Mexico and the Portales community. I believe that people should be able to go to school and not have to worry about being exposed to these products that harm them. I personally have been exposed to these products in the bathrooms at my school. So, when I saw the Evolvement poster and learned about the training, I was so touched about the passion they have for creating a tobacco free community. I convinced some friends to join with me and I’m pretty sure they enjoyed it as well as I did. I also talked to some of the leadership team members and thought it was really cool to hear about how long they’ve been in the program, and to see how passionate they were about the work they’re doing.

At the training we learned about what exactly Evolvement does and learned how we can help prevent tobacco use in our community. The Evolvement staff had us learn about the dangers of tobacco use and the tactics the tobacco company uses to market their products by putting us into groups and watching videos and answering questions. They also had us practice collecting surveys and photo pledge cards by having our groups go out and collect as many as we could during lunch. This was cool because we kind of made it a competition to see who could collect the most and after we got to eat free Subway which was great because I was hungry.

What I took away from this experience is that we have what it takes to provide a tobacco free community because we can use our voices to work on saving our kids and community. That’s what I love about this program, that they worked super hard for us. It helped me learn more about this stuff and see that I can be a part of protecting young people.

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