Better Together
Impact Story
We started the Better Together program in 2020.
The Teen Advisory Council worked hard to create a positive impact on the Prescott community through our campaign, but it was difficult to reach a broader audience with the little funding we had. However, when we received a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation, it helped us enlarge our campaign to reach more people in the tri-city community and allowed us to restructure our program to have a greater impact. Now, we hope to continue our program for three years to help our community come together to enhance our communication skills and promote respectful conversations around even the most controversial topics. Though we’ve only had this grant for 5 months, we can already see the difference it has made in TAC. Below, we have impact statements written by different teens who are a part of the advisory council that demonstrate how this grant has helped us expand the work we’re doing with our Better Together campaign.
TAC had always been a pretty small group.
In the past we hadn’t spent much time trying to find new members, because our projects had never been as large and complex as this one. Recruiting was something new to all of us, and it was a challenge to get our message out and persuade like-minded teens to apply. Eventually, after announcements and flyers, we started interviewing. It was such a rewarding experience to see that there were teens who agreed and supported us. Beyond that it was amazing to find a more concrete idea of what we wanted to get out of the Better Together campaign, as we found the people who would be carrying on the project after the seniors on TAC had to leave for college. The whole experience demonstrated the growth we had, and that was given to us through this grant, as we could teach new and passionate individuals about what we had been working on and what we had learned since the start of this project. Now, it is such an amazing experience as we continue to grow with the drive and ideas that have been added into the project through finding and recruiting other motivated young people.
The survey for Better Together was formed over many TAC meetings until we settled on the phrasing that reflected our goal for the grant.
We were able to produce the survey with our funding and get it out for testing within a few months. It was revised multiple times before it was released to be tested by a small number of participants. The final revisions took place after our first time making it available for the public. It was a long process, but it was rewarding to see it play out. In the end, the survey we were able to create with these resources gave us experience with the technicalities of surveying and interactions with the community that allowed us to better understand the best use for our funding in the upcoming years.
It took many meetings to come up with an idea to come up with the Better Together logo.
We came up with the idea of skeletons due to the fact everyone is the same on the inside. We made the skeletons in a more cartoony fashion to make it appeal to every generation. Our logo is now printed on stickers and tote bags. We will use these as an incentive to get people to take out surveys and as marketing.
Overall, in the two years we have been working on Better Together, we have had many new and challenging experiences.
We started as a relatively small group and managed to grow both our numbers and the reach we have in our community. TAC as a group has grown and overcome many difficult roadblocks in expanding Better Together and the message it sends to everyone in Prescott. Whether the new challenge be recruiting and training new members, designing a logo for our new merchandise, creating a mission statement, or both testing and distributing the survey, we have been able to work together and use our resources – especially the ACF grant – to do the best we can to make our community everyone’s hometown.
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