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ADAPT Town Hall Meeting
Hosted by:
ADAPT Lamorinda
How does alcohol and other drug misuse affect your community?
Our community is affluent, highly motivated, and high achieving, and schools are at the heart of it. However, our community has higher youth usage rates for marijuana, alcohol, and vaping than most of the other school districts in the county. It seems that parents are somewhat complacent about substance use—they are busy and don't have the time or tools to speak to their kids about it, so we continue to see high usage rates.
What challenge(s) did you face in planning your activity this year?
- Lack of awareness of our event or organization
- Inexperience hosting Communities Talk activities
How did you overcome these challenges?
We were able to get the word out through community outreach.
What are your next steps?
- Host follow-up meetings or activities
- Create new action groups to tackle specific issues raised during our Communities Talk activity
- Expand our coalition with new partnerships in the community
- Create a public education campaign to raise awareness and/or change behaviors around underage drinking (i.e., create PSAs and other promotional materials)
Which Communities Talk resources (or other SAMHSA resources) were most helpful for your activity?
- Communities Talk website
- Communities Talk toolkits
How did a Communities Talk event help you address those issues?
- Mobilized coalition members or other stakeholders
- Engagement with local government leaders and business owners to consider policy changes such as social hosting laws or restaurant worker trainings
- Educated youth and parents
- Built community cohesiveness and support for our efforts
- Helped plan future prevention efforts
- Made making good health behavior choices fun and engaging
- Raised awareness of substance abuse and/or underage drinking issues in our community
- Brought together key stakeholders connected to consequences and messaging for parents and students regarding substances of underage substance use-schools, parents and law enforcement.
How did your event make an impact on underage drinking in your community?
We brought together different community sectors for one of the first events focused on substance use prevention in our community. We hope that it will pave the way for future communication and prevention efforts, as well as lead to community members being more informed about the consequences related to substance use and misuse among youth.
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