Not In My Room Trailer

The “Not In My Room Trailer” is an interactive display that can travel to schools, youth-serving organizations, or events in the community to show parents/guardians how to spot possible substance use in a youth’s life, and can be set up as a classroom or a bedroom. Our “Not In My Room” trailer began with a focus on vaping/e-cigarettes, but the Communities Talk stipend allowed us to expand to include alcohol misuse as a topic of discussion. We held multiple events with this traveling display and provided presentations about the dangers of substance use, including alcohol, and how to have hard conversations with youth.

Approximately 20% of youth in our community reported consuming alcohol within the past 30 days. In addition, we have a large Hispanic/Latino youth population, of which 37% reported consuming alcohol within the past 30 days. E-cigarettes are also an area of concern for our community, with17% of youth reporting e-cigarette use in the past 30 days, and 19.1% of Hispanic youth reporting the same. And, throughout the past 5 years, our community has lost eight young people to suicide, which leads us to believe that our community’s substance misuse is a multi-faceted concern that needs to be addressed.

• Reduce prevalence of underage drinking and other substances in community
• Create an ongoing conversation about underage drinking and substance use prevention in the community
• Create new resources/materials (e.g., publications, handouts, factsheets, videos, graphics) to support prevention of underage drinking and misuse of other substances

• Inexperience hosting Communities Talk activities

We did a lot of research through the Communities Talk website to learn the best methods to host an event and see how we could accomplish these methods to reach the most individuals and make the biggest impact.

• Prevention-related webinars
• Communities Talk website
• Communities Talk toolkits
• Communities Talk social media content (e.g., Facebook, Twitter)

The Healthy Communities of Clinton County Coalition was instrumental in the planning, promotion, and coordination of these activities. Beyond that, the Mental Health and Substance Use Team ran the ‘Not In My Room Trailer’ at events. In addition, school leaders, business leaders, local police, youth-serving organizations, and medical personnel were involved in our coalition and work team, and greatly helped us execute these displays and presentations.

Yes, but we implemented safety measures to regulate the number of people in the trailer at one time. We also required attendees to wear masks and practice social distancing.