Day in the Life of an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs (ATOD) Colleague: Learning from Each Other (4211.0)

Presenter: Maria Julian

Come chat with ATOD members about their career paths in public health, including nonprofit management.

Helping public health regulators improve retailer compliance with tobacco and vaping control laws (5002.0)

Presenter: Maria Julian

Specialized compliance tools, training, and resources can help public health regulators improve retailers’ adherence to tobacco and vaping control laws. When combined, these tools can be expected to improve retail compliance and reduce demands on enforcement authorities. More importantly, these outcomes can help reduce youth tobacco and nicotine use and initiation.

Learn more about the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs section of APHA here.

The Systems Analyst will be responsible for assisting with product management of all internal and external technology solutions. This role will spend 75% time on Systems Analysis tasks and up to 25% time on Project Management tasks.

If you have…

• Exceptional analysis and problem-solving abilities
• Validated knowledge of a formal system implementation methodology
• SQL query and data analysis skills
• Proven experience managing SaaS software development projects including data migration
• Working experience in Agile (Scrum) teams with software development framework and methodologies
• Exceptional oral and written communication skills
• A commitment to and passion for Counter Tools’ mission and values
• A genuine interest in place-based public health and health equity for all populations

…we want to hear from you!

Location: This is a remote position. The position will require travel to client-partner states as needed and to Chapel Hill, NC at least once per year. Remote employees must provide internet, phone, and an appropriate place to work while in their remote location of choice.

Salary and benefits: Salary range of $85-100,000; health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, life insurance, health spending account, paid time off, and a 401K plan.

Download the PDF: Systems Analyst position

To apply, please send your resume, a letter expressing your interest, and IT functional specification document you have authored to Maria Julian at maria@countertools.org. We are reviewing applications and interview qualified candidates on a rolling basis.

Inspired by both a compass and a star, our new logo represents a guiding tool. The interlocking triangles symbolize the interconnectivity of a community and the power of working together.

Counter Tools was founded in 2012 with the mission to empower communities to become healthier places for all. Despite the change in our appearance, our mission and core values remain the same. We are a 501(c)(3) public health consulting organization that aims to promote health equity by reducing the detrimental impact of unhealthy substances at the consumer’s primary point of contact: the retail environment. 

Since our founding, our team of public health experts has helped communities across the country — in over 30 states and counting — enact meaningful policy change. We provide reliable technology, accessible data analytics, and full-spectrum support, tailored to address the unique needs of each community we serve. We partner with you throughout the entire policy change process — from planning and implementation to enforcement and evaluation.

Thank you for being a part of the Counter Tools community through its many growth spurts. We encourage you to explore our new website to find resources and the latest news. Contact us for more details or to share your feedback!

Tell us a little bit about your background before you came to Counter Tools.

I grew up in a small town in central Illinois and moved to Carbondale, Illinois to complete my undergraduate studies and earn my Master of Public Health from Southern Illinois University. During my time in southern Illinois, I had the privilege of working within the community benefits department at a local hospital system under various grants pertaining to substance misuse, community health, and school health as a graduate assistant. These experiences deepened my understanding of public health challenges and reinforced my commitment to addressing health disparities.

After graduate school, I secured a position as a tobacco cessation coordinator and co-led a local coalition focused on reducing tobacco disparities through policy, systems, and environmental changes in southern Illinois. This role allowed me to engage directly with the community and work on impactful health initiatives.

How long have you worked at Counter Tools and what made you decide to work here?

I began working at Counter Tools in May 2024. In my previous role, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Counter Tools on a local coalition project in southern Illinois. I was inspired by the mission of improving place-based public health and the team’s ability to help states and local authorities across the country. Additionally, I respected Counter Tools’ core values of equity, diversity, and inclusion and how they put them at the forefront of their work, which oftentimes many organizations overlook. This alignment with my own values made joining Counter Tools an easy decision. 

What is something you enjoy about your role?

As a project director, I have the honor of working with various clients across the country to advance their initiatives on creating healthier outcomes for their communities. I see this role as an opportunity to help states break down barriers to enacting successful and equitable PSE change related to place-based public health.

The best part of my role is the meaningful connections I get to make with each individual client, which allows me to understand their unique needs and provide tailored support. I love how my role provides endless opportunities to continuously learn and improve myself, helping me grow both professionally and personally. Our small but mighty team here at Counter Tools is pretty awesome too!

Do you have any pets, children, or other family members you’d like to mention?

I plan to move back to central Illinois very soon to be closer to my family, especially my nephews and niece! My husband, Zach, is an aircraft mechanic, and we enjoy spending our time exploring the outdoors, watching captivating Netflix movies, and cuddling with our cats!

Counter Tools is providing training and technical assistance for tobacco prevention programs and community partners to strengthen their capacity to advance evidence-based tobacco prevention policy goals. Together with TPCB, we are providing training to diverse audiences including youth and youth-serving organizations, school resource officers, alcohol law enforcement officers, local law enforcement officers, Drug Free Communities coalition members, state and local-level tobacco prevention and control practitioners, and other local public health advocates across North Carolina. We are also engaging community partners in the development of storytelling materials that will support community mobilization efforts.

This spring, counties from the NC Public Health Regions 4 and 5 assessed their retail environment to lay the groundwork for addressing it in their communities. We are working with Mecklenburg County advocates to conduct a Health Equity Impact Assessment in the coming year.

If you are an advocate, professional, or community member living in NC and are interested in learning more about this work or getting involved, please contact Ray Riordan, Director of Local Policy and Programs, at ray.riordan@dhhs.nc.gov.

We are excited to collaborate with the TPCB and local partners to strengthen tobacco policy, systems and environmental change across North Carolina!

The Project Director provides timely and high-quality project management, training, and technical assistance to Counter Tools client-partners working to advance place-based public health. Their national perspective and expertise strengthens Counter Tools’ position as a trusted thought leader in, and advances the field of, healthy communities.

If you have…

• Experience in public health policy, systems, and environmental change
• Experience in public policy, communications, grassroots organizing, or urban planning
• A demonstrated ability to manage complex, multifaceted projects resulting in measurable successes
• Assertive and concise verbal and written communication skills with exceptional attention to detail
• Personal qualities of integrity, credibility, and collaboration
• A commitment to and passion for Counter Tools’ mission and values
• Genuine interest in place-based public health and health equity for all populations
• Data analysis experience to support systems change

…we want to hear from you!

Location: This is a remote position. The position will require travel to client-partner states as needed and to Carrboro, NC at least once per year. Remote employees must provide internet, phone, and an appropriate place to work while in their remote location of choice.

Salary and benefits: Salary range of $56-65,000; health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, life insurance, health spending account, paid time off, and a 401K plan.

Download the PDF: Project Director position

To apply, please send your resume, a letter expressing your interest, and a 1-3-page writing sample to Maria Julian at maria@countertools.org. Applications are due by 5:00 pm Eastern on Tuesday, March 21, 2023. We will begin inviting applicants to interview as soon as applications are received.

We at Counter Tools know that tobacco- and alcohol-related health problems disproportionately affect people of color, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups. Structural elements—both governmental and organizational policies and practices, including those that historically have and continue to disadvantage certain groups, along with industry targeting—impact exposure, availability, and access to both healthy and harmful products. We want our work with our partners and clients to reflect the communities we collectively serve, address health disparities, and strive toward a more equitable world. We strongly encourage applications from diverse individuals, including but not limited to diversity in such characteristics as race/ethnicity, national origin, age, socioeconomic background, religion, creed, veteran’s status, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and disability. Counter Tools is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Where we’ve been

Over the past decade, we’ve learned that the retail environment can make a drastic impact on the health of a community, particularly for disinvested and marginalized communities. Community-led data gathering and storytelling are powerful forces that can shape the policy landscape and address health inequities. The point of sale remains a critical entrypoint for harmful substances such as tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, sugar-sweetened beverages, and other unhealthy food to enter our community. 

Early partners 

Community and public health advocates have demonstrated that meaningful point-of-sale policy change is possible with grassroots community action, inclusive partnerships, and the right tools to leverage.

Supporting healthier places for all starts with building relationships and documenting the local problem. States such as Minnesota, Vermont, Nebraska, Florida, Indiana, Wisconsin, and South Carolina worked with Counter Tools to build a strategy for addressing tobacco prevention and control at the point of sale informed by local data and stories. 

Since 2012, the Minnesota Department of Health has partnered with Counter Tools to equip local public health advocates with the knowledge and data needed to educate stakeholders, build community awareness, and enact effective policy change. Minnesota’s notable successes in addressing tobacco at the point of sale are evidenced by:

• A statewide commitment to reduce the influence of the marketing and sale of tobacco products.
• More than 1,000 store audits conducted across the state each data collection year, providing an extensive amount of data to leverage for policy change.
• Significant local policy wins on Tobacco 21, flavored bans, and retailer proximity and density restrictions, such as Bloomington’s endgame policy with a retailer cap of zero to eventually sunset all tobacco licenses.
• Targeted support for localities to reach their policy goals through an extensive network of collaborative partners and technical assistance providers.

Read about one Minnesota city’s comprehensive tobacco prevention policy successes in 2019 here.

Early technology adopters

When Counter Tools launched in 2012, our original software tools, the Store Audit Center and Store Mapper, had recently been developed. We immediately launched our first mobile electronic data collection project in Minnesota and launched the Store Mapper for North Carolina.

In 2014, the Arizona Office of the Attorney General partnered with Counter Tools for the first tobacco enforcement project of its kind, breaking down data silos and encouraging multi-agency collaboration. We worked together to develop a new integrated tobacco enforcement platform, the Arizona Tobacco Enforcement System (AZ TES), bringing together GIS mapping, reporting, data collection planning and management, sampling, violation tracking, and retailer list management, as well as online and offline data collection. 

Our focus on fostering multi-agency data collaboration continued as the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Maryland Department of Health partnered with Counter Tools to launch the Point of Sale Toolkit (POST) in 2016. In the years that followed, nearly a dozen states across the country have used POST to meet even more data collection needs, including store assessments and merchant education efforts.

A broader look at the retail environment

In 2013, Counter Tools began partnering with state and local health partners to assess and address more substances found in the retail environment that are known empirically to impact health outcomes. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment began mapping tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis retailers across the state. In subsequent years, the Wisconsin Tobacco Prevention and Control Program began assessing the retail landscape for alcohol and unhealthy food products in addition to tobacco products. The Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services partnered with Counter Tools to build an alcohol Mapper and a data dashboard to capture alcohol availability across Virginia. Many states continue to collect retail environment data on alcohol, cannabis, and other substances.

Where we’re headed

We envision a nation where healthy living is equitable across communities and every person has access to healthful choices. Our vision for place-based public health remains the same, but we are finding creative new ways to problem solve and learn with our partners how we can best achieve this vision together. Our stance on equity, diversity and inclusion guides how we, as an organization, aim to work alongside our partners and clients to address health disparities.

Continuing our core work

Counter Tools continues to support public health prevention and enforcement partners to address health disparities in their communities starting with the retail environment. 

We offer technical assistance, storytelling and data visualization, training, technology tools and services to support policy, systems, and environmental changes to the retail environment as it relates to tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis products, and other topics of interest such as healthy food, opioids, and healthy food.  We partner with organizations such as the Geographic Health Equity Alliance to facilitate learning collaboratives to support state tobacco control programs. Our Healthy Point of Sale webinar series offers insights into place-based public health strategies such as tobacco-related assurances of voluntary compliance. 

In partnership with the CDC Office on Smoking and Health, CounterTobacco.Org launched in 2011 as the first comprehensive resource for local, state, and federal organizations working to counteract commercial tobacco product sales and marketing at the point of sale. Today, the site offers evidence-based descriptions of the problem, policy solutions, advocacy materials, news updates, a podcast, and an image gallery exposing tobacco industry tactics at the point of sale. Partner projects such as fSTARS with Truth Initiative share data on how flavored tobacco products are marketed and sold in various communities and provide assessment resources and tools for communities to adapt for their own policy change goals. Developed in partnership with ChangeLab Solutions, the Tobacco Point-of-Sale Preemption Playbook equips tobacco prevention staff and their partners with the knowledge, context, and resources needed to understand how preemption influences their work.

Investing in new partnerships

While our Counter Tools team serves as a thought leader in mapping tobacco retailers and addressing place-based public health, we recognize the increasing impact of cannabis and alcohol in the retail environment on health, especially for made-vulnerable populations. We support client-partners in addressing health disparities through mapping and tracking alcohol outlet density and will be supporting health equity impact assessments in the new year.

Looking into the future, we’re improving the accessibility of our tools and building interactive data dashboards to meet the growing need for dynamic data tracking and storytelling. We’re continuing to facilitate spaces for peer-to-peer learning, including our new Cannabis Learning Collaborative that features participants from states across the country with recently adopted or pending adult use cannabis legislation. Our ongoing collaborative for states with tobacco point-of-sale preemption provides a platform for exchanging strategies and knowledge to support local control for tobacco control policy.

Thanks to our partners

At the core of our mission and goals is the partnerships that make it all possible. To our partners in place-based public health, thank you for collaboration and support of Counter Tools!

Healthy Active Communities sets out to explore and expand conversations around the impacts of policy and systems change to reduce chronic conditions in communities through health equity, nutrition security with weight-inclusive approaches.

The 2022 conference will be a great place for students and professionals in national, tribal, state and local public health; community organizations and nonprofits; and, health care and nutrition professionals to contribute and learn. We hope insight from across the United States will foster innovation, enthusiasm, and progress in communities around Oregon and beyond.

Counter Tools staff member Mollie Mayfield will be presenting on healthy retail and the retail environment as a social determinant of health. Other conference topics include Strategies for De-Emphasizing BMI for More Equitable Health Promotion, Racist Origins of Anti-Fat Bias, Food Justice, Marketing Unhealthy Foods to Children (especially children of color), Building an Equity Foundation for Sugary Drinks Policy, and more.

Learn more about the conference, speakers, and agenda at HealthyActiveCommunities.com.

Register for the virtual conference here.

We empower communities to become healthier places for all.

Our mission for the past ten years has guided us to support our partners as they work to improve the health of their communities. We know that the places where people live, work, learn, and play greatly impact our health. Our work has always focused on addressing place-based public health issues that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.

Equity for all has become even more critical in how we define ourselves and our work. We recognize that not every individual or community has equal access to healthy spaces and opportunities. Structural elements – including both governmental and organizational policies and practices – historically have and continue to disadvantage certain racial groups through institutional racism. These structural elements, along with industry targeting, impact exposure, availability, and access to both healthy and harmful products.

For example, we know that historical and ongoing policies and practices like redlining have created neighborhood segregation, which has in turn allowed the tobacco industry to easily target already underserved communities with marketing for harmful products.

We define health equity to mean that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as they can be, which means reducing and removing structural barriers and obstacles that apply to and extend beyond the retail environment.

To guide our efforts in making changes both internally and externally, we released a stance that defines how we approach equity, diversity, and inclusion. Internally, we have made operational changes to continue to learn, hold ourselves accountable, and actively work to address the implicit biases and structural racism that make up our world. We continually work to empower and equip our partners with the resources, knowledge and understanding necessary to combat racism, health disparities, and inequality in their communities.

Adding the words “for all” to our mission reflects our ongoing commitment to health equity and inclusion. It also signifies how important it is to us to be an active participant in the larger conversation about racism, other systems of inequality, and their intersectionalities. We thank our partners for continually inspiring us with innovative examples of how to create more equitable communities and working with us towards this goal.

Jabari Sullen, MPA

Jabari Sullen, MPA, is the Division Manager of Tobacco Control and Health Policy at Well-Ahead Louisiana. Jabari leads the tobacco control team in the identification of state needs, development of strategies, and facilitation of partnerships with multi-sector stakeholders, to implement best practices that improve the health and reduce tobacco use and tobacco related disease throughout the state. Jabari has over 13 years of experience working in state public health, in areas of communication, project and grant management, budgeting, strategic planning, event planning, supervision, and data collection and management.

Malembe Dumont, MCRP

Malembe Dumont has a deep understanding of community-led/engaged infrastructures and alternative solutions, environmental justice, social determinants of health, and global health. She has experience working with communities in Africa, Latin America and the U.S.; and soon will be in transition to start her PhD. She holds a bachelor in Political Science from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, a masters in International Sustainable Development from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, and a second masters as a Fulbright fellow in City and Regional Planning from Rutgers with specialization in community planning and health/environmental justice.

Mischael Metelus, MHA

Mischael Metelus is the Quality Manager for Medicare at MetroPlus Health. He has over 6+ years of health insurance experience in the public and private sector with a focus on quality management and strategic planning. In his spare time he volunteers as a mentor with first generation college students and also served as the fundraising chair at America Needs You, during the 2020 year.

We are grateful for the leadership, expertise, and service that each of our board members bring to Counter Tools. Learn more about our board members here.