Your Meeting Agenda:
Mapping the Way From Information to Action

A Town Hall Meeting (THM) without a well-thought-out agenda is like a road trip without a map. You might cover a lot of ground, but will you ever reach the desired destination?

One goal of your THM is to raise public awareness about underage drinking; another goal is to mobilize your community to take action to prevent it. Your agenda is your meeting map, giving attendees a direct path between what they will learn and what they can do. In other words, build your THM agenda around “news they can use.” Start with three key questions below.

In creating an agenda, your planning community should answer these key questions:

• Who is your audience? Are the people you want to attend the parents of middle or high school students, college students under age 21, local government officials who might fund a prevention campaign, or a different group? Clearly identifying your audience is the first step in indentifying topics that will emphasize why the prevention of underage drinking is important to them. To ensure that you move forward in the right direction, be sure to include at least one member of your audience on your planning committee or as an adviser to it. These individuals can provide great insight about informing and engaging the people you want to attend your THM. 

• What does your audience need or want to know most? Each target audience will have different information needs. Consider the sample target audiences listed above. Parents, for example, may be interested in emerging research about alcohol’s effect on a young person’s developing brain and other risks of alcohol use. Parents also may need to be informed about their continuing influence over their children’s attitudes and behaviors toward alcohol. College students may be more motivated to avoid alcohol use by learning about significant risks of alcohol use for their age group, such as personal injury, violence, and unwanted or unprotected sex. Local government officials may want hard facts about the prevalence and consequences of underage drinking in the community and best practices in its prevention.

Think also about factors within your community that might place young people at greater risk for alcohol use, such as too few afterschool activities or a high density of alcohol outlets around the college campus. Introduce these factors during your THM so that community members can consider how they might eliminate or limit their effect. Reach out to members of your audience to solicit other topics of interest.

• What do you want your audience to do with this information? Another way to look at this question is “What is the call to action?” For example, a call to action can be as basic as parents talking to their children about the importance of avoiding alcohol. A call also can respond to a specific issue in your community, such as asking attendees to sponsor or volunteer for afterschool activities for children who might otherwise be unsupervised or to form a college–community coalition to investigate ways to restrict on- and off-campus drinking during sporting events.

THMs are designed to bring communities together to learn about underage drinking and to brainstorm ways to prevent it. Be sure your agenda includes time for participants to ask questions and to develop a call to action that is guided by issues of greatest concern to them and their unique capacity to respond. Prevention is never one-size-fits-all.

The following chart displays a sample agenda that might be created by an organization that has partnered with the local high school in hosting a THM. In this scenario, the planning committee identified:

• Parents as the audience.
• The significant role of parents in preventing underage drinking as the need-to-know topic.
• One call to action of providing alcohol-free graduation celebrations.
• A question-and-answer session for attendees to brainstorm their next steps.