The ARCH Coalition, in collaboration with many community partners, is working on a youth substance abuse prevention program for all middle- and high-school students in Hopkins County. Our program is based on an extremely successful international model that was first developed in Iceland in the 1990’s. The Icelandic Model of Prevention (IMP), as it came to be known, reduced youth substance use (alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and illicit drugs) in Iceland SIX FOLD (from 46% of youth reporting substance use within the past 30 days to 7%) over the first 15 years of the project. By any standard, that is remarkable success. The IMP has been adopted in many countries in all parts of the world and is beginning to gain traction in the United States, as well. The program is highly data-driven so that impact can be clearly assessed at all stages of the program. It is based on two very simple and straightforward premises. First, kids will make fewer bad decisions and get in less trouble if they have better things to do and, second, if adults engage more with their kids and other youth in their communities, the results will be positive. There’s actually a lot of science behind the structure of the program, but that is, essentially, the gist of it. Who knew? Well, everybody knows these things, but the problem is that we don’t often act on that knowledge well enough. We’re changing that.
We are working with schools, our local YMCA, our County Extension Office, 4-H, churches, our county sports complex, Junior Achievement, our local community college, local business and economic development organizations, our county Agency for Substance Abuse Policy (ASAP), outdoor education programs, mentoring programs, healthcare providers, our Career and Technology Center, the West Area Health Education Center (AHEC), substance use treatment providers, and others of our nonprofit community partners to adapt and implement the IMP program here. The key to the program is to have structured, supervised activities available for kids when school is not in session, both after school and when school is not in session. We are going to start out our program with activities in five areas: athletics, arts, career/mentoring/life skills, gaming and digital arts, and outdoors and agriculture. This is a permanent project, not a two- or three-year thing, so we will adjust our activities as things progress, based on interests and impacts. We will also be working with the schools and other organizations to help parents and adults engage more effectively with our kids.
One of the great things about this program is that, even if it fails completely to prevent substance use among our youth (which, based on the past record of success of the program, won’t happen), just expanding the activities available to our kids will be a HUGE win, filling a need that has been noted on every community needs assessment we’ve had in the past 50 years.
We’re currently building up our coalition of partners and laying out the plans for our activities. We are also already working on some of the logistical challenges that we know, again, based on the experience of other IMP programs, we will encounter, mainly transportation (bringing the activities and the kids together) and the costs associated with some activities. Of course, this program, like everything else, is subject to funding limitations, but we are, and have been, working on that challenge for quite some time. We will not allow either of those factors to prevent any of our youth from taking advantage of this program. We plan to kick off the program in September of this year, as the new school year begins.
