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Barrington Alcohol Scorecard Community Review
Hosted by:
The BAY Team – Barrington Prevention Coalition
Please briefly describe your Communities Talk activity.
We held a virtual event with community stakeholders to discuss our alcohol data that had been prepared by our evaluators. This virtual event was to reflect on various aspects of alcohol in our community, including youth alcohol use, access, law enforcement, and policy. Working with a youth videographer, we storyboarded the messages needed to raise awareness. This storyboard will become a community public service announcement (PSA), with the goal of improving our alcohol prevention efforts in 2022–2023.
How does alcohol and other drug misuse affect your community?
Our alcohol scorecard showed a need for more for law enforcement involvement and a need for access to more specific data related to underage alcohol incidents. This community had several social host violations and underage drinking events related to adults providing alcohol and condoning youth alcohol use. This is particularly concerning, as this community has a history of multiple youth alcohol-related driving fatalities.
What goal(s) did you hope to accomplish with your Communities Talk activity?
- Reduce prevalence of underage drinking and other substances in community
- Create an ongoing conversation about underage drinking and substance use prevention in the community
- Foster collaboration between community stakeholders for continued underage drinking and substance use prevention activities
- Create new resources/materials (e.g., publications, handouts, factsheets, videos, graphics) to support prevention of underage drinking and misuse of other substances
- Improve policy/legislation (e.g., reducing alcohol advertising to which youth are exposed; instituting, promoting, or increasing alcohol compliance checks; improving
- Awareness and enforcement of social host laws) to support prevention of underage drinking
What challenge(s) did you face in planning your activity this year?
- Lack of interest from the community
- Adapting to conducting a virtual activity
How did you overcome these challenges?
We overcame these challenges by continuing our plans despite having to use a virtual platform.
What are your next steps?
- Support new prevention policies, legislation, or social ordinances
- 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?
- StopAlcoholAbuse.gov website
- Communities Talk website
- Communities Talk planning guides
- Communities Talk toolkits
- Communities Talk social media content (e.g., Facebook, Twitter)
- Planning guides and toolkits gave us a great start
Who did you involve in your activity planning, and who did your activity impact?
Coalition members and youth helped plan and facilitate the event. The media to be created will target parents and adults in the community. An effort will be undertaken to secure resources for law enforcement to increase compliance checks/party patrols and data acquisition.
Did the COVID-19 pandemic affect the planning or execution of your activities?
Yes, the COVID-19 pandemic affected our activity. We would have had an in-person event, but due to COVID-19, it was virtual, which may not have appealed to as wide an audience.
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