The Tempe Community Council is now accepting logo design submissions for its campaign to target underage drinking and drug use.
This contest was the latest push by the council in its campaign to target underage drinking and drug use, said Lynette Stonefeld, director of communities in schools for the Tempe Community Council.
Through the contest, the council is striving to incorporate fellow students in the effort to reach out to students with a message about underage drinking, she said.
Christine Barela, assistant principal at Desert Vista High School in Phoenix, said she believes getting youth involved in designing a marketing strategy for their peers is an effective way to target teens.
“They’ll listen to each other instead of being told what to do by an adult,” Barela said. “If it comes from their peers, they’re more likely to listen because at that level, friends and what they think is extremely important to kids.”
The contest will be accepting design submissions from Tempe students in grades six through 12 until Dec. 1.
The council is offering several prizes as incentives, including an 8-gigabyte iPod Nano for first place, a 10-megapixel digital camera for second place and movie tickets and a variety of other prizes for the runners-up, according to the community council’s Web site.
The council’s research through focus groups and online surveys of teens confirmed that teens responded the most to a message from fellow teens, Stonefeld said.
“Local teenagers told us that the best way to impact them was to let them hear it from someone their own age, someone who has had a problem with alcohol or drugs,” she said. “They know their peers better than someone out of their age group, so that’s something we can use.”
The student’s logo design submissions will be reviewed by the council’s steering committee and narrowed down to about a dozen designs, which will be posted on MySpace before being judged by a group of 10 to 12 student judges.
“We’re hoping to get volunteers from different interest groups, schools and ethnicities, so hopefully we’ll get one [design] that’ll be effective to a wide variety of students,” Stonefeld said.
The logo design contest is the first of three youth contests the community council plans to hold for the campaign against underage drinking and drug use, including T-shirt and video contests in the spring.
The council already purchased six hand-held cameras for students interested in participating in the video contest who don’t have access to cameras of their own, Stonefeld said
Barela said she believed this contest was a great idea because targeting youth is a good first step in attacking the societal problem of underage drinking.
The council’s research over the past year revealed the average age Tempe children begin drinking is 12.4 years old, Stonefeld said. The council sharpened its focus to target the younger age group in order to prevent drinking problems later in life, she said.
“Research tells us that kids who start drinking before age 15 are far more likely to have drinking problems later in life,” Stonefeld said. “Our goal is to delay the onset of regular use of alcohol in kids.”
