APHA's Student Assembly visits Capitol Hill offices: public health students advocate for more health, SCHIP funding.

They shook hands firmly. They used talking points. They listened. They advised. After three hours of advocating on Capitol Hill this past November, 120 members of APHA's Student Assembly learned that legislators listen to what their constituents have to say.

Organized by the Student Assembly, the Nov. 5 event capped an advocacy training activity that began with a hands-on workshop on the Saturday before the start of APHA's 135th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Student Assembly leaders organized the event in response to students' hunger for advocacy training and additional opportunities to advocate.

Event co-organizer Mariza Hardin, former cochair of the Student Assembly's Action Committee, said providing students with opportunities that are generally unavailable to them at their respective schools is one of the Student Assembly's main roles. With Washington, D.C., serving as the backdrop for the 2007 APHA Annual Meeting, Student Assembly leaders seized the opportunity to create an event that would feed off the city's perpetually high level of advocacy energy.

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The 120 students who took part in the advocacy trip met at the Student Assembly booth at the APHA Public Health Expo in the Washington Convention Center, where they received instructions and talking points about why reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program is important to APHA and its members.

"We caused quite a crowd," said Hardin, noting that the students' excitement ran high, especially because about 75 percent of them had never visited Capitol Hill.

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The group used the Metro subway system to travel the short distance to the Hart and Russell Senate office buildings, where they split up into two groups and during a three-hour period visited the offices of 20 U.S. senators. Each visit lasted about 20 minutes to 30 minutes, said Hardin, who along with co-organizer Denise Burke scheduled the appointments in advance to ensure that each participant would have the opportunity to meet with a senator or staff member from her or his own state.

Senators and staff members were very responsive to the students' comments and were "well prepared to speak with the students about SCHIP and other public health issues," said Hardin, who is pursuing a master's degree in public health at the University of New Mexico.

Hardin said the majority of the senators were in support of SCHIP, "so the students went in and thanked them for their support and urged them to continue to support the bill."

In some offices, students met with senators' health policy analysts, many of whom later followed up via e-mail with answers to the students' questions.

"They were all very eager to hear from the Student Assembly," Hardin said, noting that Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., spent more than 20 minutes speaking with six of the students about the importance of SCHIP and his support of it. "It was really informative to the students on their first advocacy Hill visit to get that one-on-one with the senator and hear his thoughts and support on this issue, and it was really generous of him to spend that much time with us."

Overall, the students "did a wonderful job" of voicing their concerns about the importance of SCHIP, Hardin said, adding that "any senator who has constituents in their office voicing that much passion about an issue ... they will definitely take a second look at it."

Meharry Medical College students Erica Hayes and Calandra Whitted talked about their meeting with a legislative aide in the office of Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

"He made time to sit down with us and was very open to discussing issues such as increasing the public health infrastructure and the public health education system in the state of Tennessee," Whitted told The Nation's Health. "Advocating is very important if we want to bring about change and see growth in the public health sector. Students have a voice and need to make their voices heard simply by letting elected officials know what they want."

For more advocacy information, visit www.apha.org/advocacy. For more on the Student Assembly, visit www.aphastudents.org.

--Teddi Dineley Johnson in Washington, D.C.