Please share Prevention Diaries with colleagues teaching undergraduate and graduate courses 

Prevention Diaries was published shortly after the election, and given the current Administration’s priorities the book’s vision has been hard to advance in terms of immediate policy change. But taking the longer view, the main reason I wrote Prevention Diaries is to reach and inspire the next generation of prevention leaders, and that's where I need everyone's help. Through personal accounts and storytelling, Diaries unveils the passion and the logic behind prevention and serves as a guide to find solutions that advance health and equity. Ideal for current health leaders, practitioners, newcomers to public health, students of health and related fields, Diaries is an accessible read for anyone interested in health and community. While our publisher, Oxford University Press, is well-connected, I know that my colleagues here on this email list who are deeply invested in our work can help elevate the book and its purpose. 

Many of you work in academia, are students, or more of you link with academic colleagues, and I would deeply appreciate your spreading the word about Diaries to your contacts from health and related fields, including public health, pre-med and medicine, nursing, social work, planning, public policy, social justice, etc. 

Teachers can order a free review copy of Prevention Diaries from Oxford University Press. Individual chapters are also available for purchase from Oxford University Press for content-specific classes. Additionally, we created free online chapter guides to help build these key topics into curricula and learning opportunities in a meaningful way. This interactive resource includes discussion questions, slide sets, and related resources offer a deeper dive into the content of each chapter. For those of you who are academics, I hope you will consider using Prevention Diaries in your classrooms. And for students, please consider sharing this with your classmates and professors or suggesting it to your department chair. 

Prevention Diaries shares the unexpected (yet foreseeable) parts of daily life that shape our health, and argues for a shift in our focus in health from crisis intervention to community-level prevention. We’ve had some great press—read reviews in Injury Prevention journal, Health Affairs, The Daily Beast, and others. In the April issue of The International Journal of Epidemiology, Peter Sainsbury writes,

“Cohen and his colleagues clearly have a very comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of society and social change… To my mind, public health is an interventionist discipline. Our purpose is to improve health, well-being and equity, and we achieve this by creating physical and social environments in which people can live healthy lives and make healthy choices. Few, however, work across a broad range of public health domains and not all are involved in the practical application of their work. For any epidemiologist who wants a taste of how prevention is currently being applied across a wide range of public health areas, Prevention Diaries offers a degustation menu. Cohen’s description of it is engaging and comprehensive… always emphasizing ‘upstream’ prevention and maximizing the benefits for the most needy.”

More importantly, I have heard from a number of seasoned colleagues that reading Diaries has helped to shape their practical vison and sustain and renew their commitment. 

Thank you for helping to spread the word! Here are a few things you can do:

• Share this letter with colleagues or let us now about anyone we should contact for outreach
• Consider writing a review of the book for any academic outlets you’re involved with 
• Read an excerpt and these online chapter guides

• Order a free review copy of Diaries from OUP
• Consider the book or any individual chapter for your syllabus / to recommend to your teachers
• Share this letter with the dean of your school and your colleagues and classmates
• Let us know any suggestions for how to reach other academics and students
  

I really appreciate your help. All the best,

Larry Cohen 
Executive Director 
Prevention Institute 
221 Oak St. 
Oakland, CA 94607 
510 444-7738 (phone) 
http://www.preventioninstitute.org

*All royalties will go to the Beverly Coleman-Miller Fellowship at Prevention Institute to support emerging leadership and scholarship in Beverly’s mission of prevention and equity.

Chapters include: Prelude to Prevention, Upstream; It’s the Environment; We Build Our Environment and Then It Builds Us; The Burden of Unfairness; Food For Thought; Injuries Are Not Accidents; Stay Safe; When People Thrive, Business Thrives; Healthcare: A Wide Angle Lens as Well as a Microscope; It Takes a Flock to Make a Bird Soar. 

“As more people start to understand prevention at the community level and engage as prevention advocates, we’ll gain collective strength in pushing for the kind of community and political change our nation needs… As this momentum snowballs, we’ll advance the conditions needed to transform the current sick- care system into a true health system. Now is the time for all of us to work together to get it right.”

- “Prelude to Prevention,” Prevention Diaries