Starting a Local Chapter of CCFC:
Methods of Bringing Our Movement to Communities

Kathy Bowman and Tim Kasser, Ph.D.
Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood-Quad Cities

Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood-Quad Cities is the first local, grass roots chapter of the national CCFC. Our mission is to work in the Quad Cities area (Davenport & Bettendorf, Iowa and Rock Island & Moline, Illinois) to counter the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, research and collaboration among organizations and individuals who care about children. We formed after Dr. Susan Linn spoke at a church in Davenport, Illinois about the adverse effects of advertising on children's psychosocial development. In this presentation, we share the story of our formation and discuss how we have developed a public education campaign to help individuals in the Quad Cities understand the problems of the commercialization of childhood.

To this end, we have worked with the national CCFC to develop handouts, a flexible power point presentation, and brochures; our talk will provide a brief overview of this material and its organization, as well as how we trained volunteers to use these materials. In addition, we have developed an Implementation Manual to help other interested parties who might want to develop their own local chapters of CCFC, keeping in mind that each chapter structure muct fit its particular community’s needs. All of these materials are available on CCFC’s website for people or organizations who want to use them to conduct public education in their own communities.

We believe that developing local chapters with trained volunteers who reach out to educate the public will be an extremely useful model for bringing theses issues to the general public and mobilizing them to advocate for legislative action at the national level. We will welcome questions about how this local chapter structure might work in your community as well as comments about how we might strengthen our own educational programming and advocacy efforts.

KATHY BOWMAN (kbowman18@aol.com) is a co-founder, along with Joyce Wiley, of CCFC’s first local chapter, CCFC-QC. She has worked in conjunction with her church's social action committee to bring awareness to the Quad-Cities community about the harmful effects of the commercialization of childhood. She has worked, in conjunction with a local committee, to develop materials for use by speakers bureau, including a power point presentation, pamphlet materials, and a brochure, all materials available on line to any other local committee that wants to start their own local educational campaign

Tim Kasser PhD (tkasser@knox.edu) is associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. He is author of The High Price of Materialism (MIT Press, 2002) and co-editor of Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World (APA, 2004).