CEO Robin Koval (Nov 2013–) | ||
Headquarters Washington, D.C., United States Similar Center for Media and Democracy, American Lung Association, RTI International, The Kresge Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New Y | ||
Truth Initiative (formerly the American Legacy Foundation) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit tobacco control organization dedicated to preventing teen smoking and encouraging smokers to quit. It was established in March 1998 as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between a coalition of attorneys general in 46 states and five United States territories and the tobacco industry. As of 2013, it had an annual budget of about $50 million and about $1 billion in assets.
The organization is best known for the truth anti-youth smoking ad campaign, which won an Effie Award in 2005.
It is also known for the creation and continued funding of the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents (TTID), a digital library hosted by the University of California, San Francisco. By September 2014, the TTID contained more than 14 million internal documents (84+ million pages) created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities.
The Washington Post reported in 2013 that an employee of the organization had diverted about $3.4M in false computer purchases from 1999 to 2007, which the organization failed to detect because it had established inadequate financial controls, and that the organization ignored a whistleblower's efforts to call attention to the issue 6 months after diversions ended, and only responded when the whistleblower again raised the issue three years later, at which point neither criminal charges nor a recovery via a civil suit were possible.
The organization changed its name to Truth Initiative on September 8, 2015, to better connect the organization as a whole with its truth campaign, its tobacco control research and policy studies, and its community and youth activism programs.