What Works: Ideas for a Successful
2016 Town Hall Meeting
10/01/2015
By the end of 2015, more than 60 Town Hall Meeting success stories will be available online to help and inspire those planning to host similar Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)-supported events in their communities in 2016. These profiles highlight what has worked to make Town Hall Meetings an effective part of preventing and reducing underage drinking among families, neighborhoods, and towns large and small.
Below are highlights of practical ideas for future Town Hall Meeting organizers as you plan events that uniquely address underage drinking in your community:
- Drawing a crowd: Here is what little Omak, Washington, did to pull in a big audience. And Stockton, Kansas, came up with another plan to get a lot of residents to its Town Hall Meeting.
- But who shows up at the Town Hall Meeting can matter more than how many; just ask the Coffee County Anti-Drug Coalition in Manchester, Tennessee. The coalition hosted parents, law enforcement, and public officials to help gain their support of Tennessee’s social host liability law, and to encourage law enforcement agencies and the courts to effectively enforce the law. Hosting a variety of key public officials, including three mayors, two police chiefs, one sheriff, and one district attorney, signaled the community’s intention to put its combined influence behind Tennessee’s social host law.
- Some community-based organizations take their Town Hall Meeting to where their audience prefers to be: in the living room. That’s how the 2012 Florida Kids and Alcohol Town Hall Meeting reached a potential audience of a quarter million, thanks to a local PBS collaboration. Or, it could be someone else’s living room that gets busy parents to show up, as shown by this Reality Party in Kamiah, Idaho.
- Are there segments of your community in which youth alcohol misuse poses a larger threat? Some Town Hall Meetings target specific populations, such as members of the LGBT community in the Orlando, Florida, area; Spanish-speaking communities in Georgia; tribal members in Oklahoma’s self-labeled “Indian Capital of the Nation”; or students on college campuses, such as those targeted by institutes of higher education and prevention partners in New York State in 2014.
- Youth engagement is the key to Town Hall Meeting success in more and more communities. A young person who has been affected by underage drinking can be a powerful prevention voice. Young filmmakers are persuasive peer educators. Students build and strengthen collaborations in their communities. Adults take note when teens deliver data about local underage alcohol problems. Some youth report their own data to illustrate their communities’ underage drinking challenges. In other places, they promote alcohol-free activities for their peers.
Success story articles can be a rich source of ideas for Town Hall Meeting planners, and are one of the many resources available at www.stopalcoholabuse.gov/communitiestalk to help you organize an event to make evidence-based underage drinking prevention work for your community in 2016.
Resources To Support Prevention Efforts
Latest SAMHSA NSDUH Shows Progress in Reducing
Teen Alcohol Use
SAMHSA’s latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) shows progress in reducing some forms of substance use, including alcohol, especially among adolescents.
Percentages of underage individuals who reported current, binge, and heavy alcohol use in 2014 were lower than the percentages in 2002 through 2012, but they were similar to the percentages in 2013. The percentage of adolescents ages 12 to 17 who reported current (past month) illegal alcohol use dropped from 17.6 percent in 2002 to 11.5 percent in 2014. Despite these declines over time, about 1 in 5 underage individuals in 2014 drank alcohol in the past month, and about 1 in 7 engaged in binge drinking. Among all underage people in 2014, 13.8 percent were binge drinkers and 3.4 percent were heavy drinkers.
For more information, read SAMHSA’s 2014 NSDUH press release. A copy of the survey is available online.
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
Releases CollegeAIM
Harmful and underage drinking remain significant problems on U.S. campuses, despite collective efforts to address them. Higher education officials understand that, all too often, alcohol-related problems can seem intractable, leading to questions and frustration over how best to reduce student drinking and its negative consequences.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has released the CollegeAIM (Alcohol Intervention Matrix) guide and website to help college personnel choose wisely among the many potential interventions to address harmful and underage college student drinking.
The centerpiece of the guide is a user-friendly, matrix-based tool developed with input from leading college alcohol researchers, along with college student life and alcohol and other drug program staff. With CollegeAIM, school officials and staff can easily use research-based information to inform decisions about alcohol intervention strategies.
The “Talk. They Hear You.” app is an interactive game that helps parents of children ages 9 to 15 learn the do’s and don’ts of talking to their kids about underage drinking. Using avatars, parents practice bringing up the topic of alcohol, learn the questions to ask, and get ideas for keeping the conversation going.
SAMHSA’s “Talk. They Hear You.” app can be used on desktop computers and mobile devices. Download the app from Apple’s App Store, Google Play™, the Windows® Store, or Windows® Phone Store.
Watch this quick video to see how the app works.