Prevention Grant Offers Unique Opportunity to Washington County
In mid-November, adult and youth leaders from around Washington County will convene to kick off a critically important project, Communities That Care prevention planning. The Washington County Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Board was one of twenty Ohio Boards to be awarded a three-year grant from the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services (ODADAS) and the federal government for the prevention of substance abuse among youth. Never before in our County have we been given such a golden opportunity to scientifically examine the unique risk factors facing our young people and to come together as a community to implement programs that have met rigorous scientific criteria for addressing those factors.
The first year of the project will involve completing the Communities That Care (CTC) planning process, a system that is based on successful public health models of community action. In the past, scarce resources have mandated that we take advantage of any and all affordable prevention programs. And while many of these programs have been valuable, prevention is not a "one size fits all" proposition. There are six characteristics of the CTC prevention planning process that make it both unique and an imperative forerunner to implementing prevention programs: It employs a systematic approach to community mobilization. All parts of the community are involved in identifying available resources and gaps in community efforts. It focuses on promoting positive youth development as well as on prevention problem behaviors. Assessing research-proven predictors of problem behaviors and positive behaviors needs will identify community needs. Existing data and information gleaned from the Communities That Care Youth Survey will be analyzed. It helps communities collect the right data. By focusing on both risk and protective factors we will be able to prioritize the predictors and create a community profile. It matches those prioritized predictors to tested, effective programs, policies, and practices that have proven their ability to affect those predictors. It helps communities implement and evaluate a community plan of action. In other words, CTC gives us a system of mobilizing the community, assessing our prevention needs from community data, choosing prevention programs that have been scientifically shown to work, implementing those programs during the second and third years of the grant, and evaluating outcomes. We will be working closely with ODADAS and CTC to find ways to sustain the programs beyond the life of the grant. The 2001 PRIDE survey of Washington County youth revealed a significant, steady increase in drug and alcohol use for each grade from eighth grade to twelfth grade. Because the grantors required a target population, we have designated Washington County youth in grades 6, 7, and 8. Exposing students to programming in all three grades will increase the likelihood that prevention efforts will be effective. Preventing drug and alcohol use among our youth is a daunting task, but we will be able to attempt it with a considerable measure of assurance that the community is united in the effort and that programs proven effective by research will target the unique problems faced by our youth.