CADCA

Well, I just returned from a national conference in Louisville, KY- home of the Louisville Slugger and the Kentucky Derby. It was an awesome opportunity! In the future, I hope we will have opportunities to send other members of the coalition to some of these conferences. The conference was organized by CADCA (Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America). There were about 1300 people from all over the nation and also various other countries. Did you know there are 5,000 substance abuse prevention coalitions across America? Wow! I attended the conference with members of Utah County's coalition. We were all required to post some things we learned on their blog, as well as some things we'd like to help implement. I thought it might be beneficial to our coalition to do the same. So, here goes...

Three things in particular stood out to me throughout the various workshops I attended:

1. What a great group of youth there were out there! I was very impressed with them. A high school student from Richfield also attended the conference with us. I was very surprised to hear that she got donations from the community to pay her own way to the conference. Now that's dedication! It was pointed out to me in various workshops what an asset youth can be to our organization. Their knowledge of social media and technology is phenomenal! Why not give them opportunities to apply these skills?

2. Somehow I ended up attending a few different workshops related to social media. We can use these outlets to promote our efforts and issues in the community. If we really want to reach people, we need to get on board the social media train (i.e. "Facebook", "Youtube", etc...).

3. Lastly, I attended a workshop on creating a "rock solid" coalition infrastructure. A couple things were suggested to improve coalition meetings. Setting up ground rules, having a "meeting monitor", and realizing it's everyone's job to help keep us on track are all things that will help our meetings to be more effective. I am already planning to implement some of these things at our next meeting. I also realized we need to find ways to reach all cultures and backgrounds in our community. Involving some of them in our coalition would be a great start.

I would like to:

1. Make youth involvement with our coalition a priority. (Love the awesome youth we already have! Thanks you guys!)

2. Create a coalition presence through different social media outlets (Keep in mind, this may take some time as we don't have a coalition name or logo yet).

3. Invite members of the community who are not presently represented on the coalition to be involved.

Aside from these things, I would really like to find the best time for all of our coalition to meet so we can start to move forward to get some things accomplished. If you haven't already, please let Anna know which of the three times would work best for you. We need every single one of you, because you all represent different agencies and have unique things to bring to the table.

Please let me know what you think of these ideas, or share your own! Thanks for reading!

Let's Get Creative!

This is certainly not our main priority, however, I would like to get any suggestions you may have for a creative name for our coalition. Utah County has come up with the name: SMART (Substance Misuse & Abuse Reduction Team). Pretty creative right? I know we've got some clever minds out there just waiting to come up with something fantastic! Obviously we haven't come up with a vision statement, but our main objective is to reduce substance abuse in Springville. Keep this in mind as you brainstorm ideas. All ideas are welcome!

Risk and Protective Factors

At our last meeting we discussed which 2-3 risk &/or protective factors we would like to focus our efforts on initially. After quite a bit of discussion, some of you expressed a desire to find out what programs we could implement for specific risk/protective factors. Below I have listed a few examples of what types of programs have been effective in dealing with these specific risk and protective factors. Please take a moment to comment with your opinion on what you would like to see us begin to address. As a reminder, our top risk factors are: low commitment to school, perceived availability of drugs and handguns, and parental attitudes favorable toward antisocial behavior and drugs. Our lowest protective factors are: school rewards for positive involvement, school opportunities for positive involvement, and prosocial involvement (which falls under the peer/individual category).

Low Commitment to School: Tooele has also had an issue with this. As a result, they have implemented a program called "Skills for Adolescence". Basically, this program is a classroom curricula for social and emotional competence. As I understand, this program has proven to be successful in their area.

Perceived Availability of Drugs & Handguns: "Project ALERT" is a curriculum implemented in schools that includes student participation, videos, classroom discussion, and role-playing to practice and master resistance skills. This program helps youth to resist peer pressure, develop reasons not to use drugs, and establish no-drug use norms.

Parental Attitudes Favorable Toward Antisocial Behavior and Drugs: "Keep a Clear Mind (KACM)" is a take-home drug education program for elementary school students in grades 4-6 (ages 9-11) and their parents. "KACM" is designed to help children develop specific skills to refuse and avoid use of "gateway" drugs. This program allows children to see what their parents actually think about these issues and provides a great opportunity for parents and children to communicate.

School Rewards/Opportunities for Positive Involvement: "Skills, Opportunities, and Recognition (SOAR)" is a program that seeks to decrease juveniles’ problem behaviors by working with children and their parents and teachers. This program does basically as the title suggests- it provides skills, opportunities and recognition to youth. This is something Tooele has implemented along with "Skills for Adolescence" and I have received some great feedback from them on this as well.

Prosocial Involvement: "Families and Schools Together (FAST)" is a program that works with at-risk individuals by bringing their family, other families, school representatives, peers and community representatives together to provide structured opportunities for involvement in repeated relationship-building interactions. However, this program is specifically geared to those who are already at-risk. The definition of this protective factor is: "Participation in positive school and community activities helps provide protection for youth". So, there could be various ways to provide positive activities while focusing on the entire population of youth.

Please keep in mind that these are only a few of the different programs that are out there for each of these risk and protective factors. These are just some examples of what is out there. Please choose 2 or 3 that you, personally, would like to focus on. Thanks!

Vision Statement

Right now we want to focus on creating a vision statement for what we would like to accomplish as a coalition. Please comment with any ideas you may have in regards to this. You may want to include such things as: where you would like to see Springville's substance abuse rates in years to come, or what kind of community environment we would like to create for youth. To help get the juices flowing, here is an example of Tooele's vision statement: "Tooele is a diverse community unified in fostering respectful and responsible citizens."

Thanks for all your help and hard work!