I joined TCEC in March of 2013, and here I am in April 2024 writing a newsletter article looking back at my 11 years with TCEC. It is a challenge to come up with a summary that does the time I have spent with TCEC justice. I don’t say that as a boast of myself, but I have been part of an amazing team that has managed to do so much. I have had the great fortune of working with great people, to work with a team that made my time at TCEC feel less like work, and more like a group of friends tossing ideas and coming up with creative content. Beyond the immediate TCEC team (or TeamCEC as I like to call them), I have also been lucky enough to get to know and collaborate with many people out there in the field. I want to say thank you to everyone who has shared their time with me. 

I joined TCEC at the start of the Healthy Stores for a Healthy Community campaign. As a team, we worked hard to get every local lead agency (LLA) in the state ready to use handheld devices for data collection. That first year, as a state, we all collected over 10,000 surveys! And we repeated two more times until 2019. Along the way, as a team, we visited many counties to provide hands-on technical assistance not just for handheld devices but also for the deployment of the public intercept surveys and key informant interviews, meeting many new friends along the way. 

During this time, TCEC continued to create online content, making webinars to help build evaluation capacity. It was in early 2019 that my colleague Danielle Lippert and I had this wild idea to use this newish online tool to do a webinar: Zoom. It occurred to us that Zoom might make it easier to connect over online webinars. Little did we know that a year later, this little Zoom thing would be the tool of choice to keep us connected during the most disconnected time in recent history. It was the leadership of Catherine Dizon that gave us the flexibility to come up and explore new ideas, and it has been that leadership that has kept TCEC at the forefront of the tobacco evaluation landscape. 

Somewhere along the line, Catherine asked me if I would be interested in looking over some of the evaluation reports that came from the field. Being eager and curious, I agreed. So, in 2017, I worked with Robin Kipke on scoring the final evaluation reports (FERs). Through reading the FERs, it was possible to get just a small peek at the challenges that agencies go through. It was from reading these FERs that we drew a lot of inspiration to develop tools, and webinars to help as best we could. 

In late 2017, during a TCEC meeting, the idea of a community of practice began to take shape. After some exploratory KIIs conducted with the help of external evaluator Sue Haun, the picture of a community of practice in evaluation became clearer. That small idea then became a call to action. With the help of some amazing evaluators from all over California, including Juliette Linzer, Jay Macedo, Denise Perales, Jay McCubbrey, Danica Peterson, and Sue Haun, the Tobacco Evaluator Alliance (TEA) was brewed into existence. Since then, our community of practice in evaluation has grown and is currently thriving, with robust attendance at every quarterly meeting. 

Over the years, our team attended so many conferences and so many events that it is hard to remember them all. But a few highlights have been the summer youth summits, put on by Kimberlee Homer-Vagadori and her team at CYAN, and Daisy Lopez and her team at the California Health Collaborative. Sarah Hellesen and I usually worked together to come up with the presentations for these. Attending those youth summits were a highlight every year, watching the next generation of leaders was so much fun. It was great to see so many young people taking interest, asking questions, and showing their out of the box ideas to addressing the social issues that we address so systematically. 

I want to thank my team here at TCEC for showing me so much. For sharing their ideas, their time and their potluck recipes with me. We have celebrated birthday parties, weddings, and commencements. We have cheered on small victories, like post-webinar celebrations, and large victories, like the passing of SB793. It has been a great journey; we have been an amazing TeamCEC. Though I won't have my TCEC spot anymore, I won't be going far. See you around, on the other side of the contract...