Prevention Works!

Community and School-Linked Prevention Approaches

Communities play an important role in the development of our youth. Through common beliefs and expectations about appropriate behavior, communities guide their members in their interactions with one another.

In healthy communities, youth are taught and shown that caring, commitment, and mutual protection are expected behaviors. Community awareness and social campaigns offer a means for changing social climates to be less tolerant of substance abuse by minors.

• Illustrate the circumstances where substance abuse is especially dangerous (i.e., using drugs or drinking if you are underage, pregnant, or driving).
• Convey that everyone has the right to make a personal choice not to use illicit substances and that it is wrong to pressure anyone else to do so.
• Advise that substances should never be used to the point of intoxication or when use negatively impacts others.

Schools are an important part of every community. By using comprehensive strategies, communities and schools can form a partnership--involving parents, human service agencies, religious, nonprofit, and volunteer organizations, businesses, and local governments--to bring together a range of resources that will strengthen families and communities and promote the healthy physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development of children.

As a partner in such a collaboration, the school may serve as a base from which an integrated and streamlined system of community programs and support services are coordinated for centralized access. Through comprehensive strategies, schools can gain community allies and access to resources to alleviate such barriers to learning as hunger, lack of medical care, inadequate child care, poverty, teen pregnancy, violence, and other problem conditions.

• Combine a range of services to respond to the needs identified by families. Program staff should know families’ views on issues that affect them and work with families to achieve their goals.
• Treat families with respect and focus on making them feel welcome at all times.
• Reduce the barriers to participation by having a single point of entry to services, simplifying eligibility requirements and procedures, reducing paperwork, and communicating clearly.
• Build partnerships between parents and professionals.
• Locate at sites that are easily accessible, near affordable and reliable public transportation, safe, and comfortable to children, families, and teachers.
• Provide services at times that are convenient for children and families.
• Involve energetic individuals with the desire to effect positive change in their community.

By developing collaborative community alliances, schools are no longer isolated providers of education, but become active partners in the broader community environment. As a result, children come to school more ready and able to learn and more likely to attend and stay in school, increasing their resistance to illicit substances, violence, and other problems.

Source: Hays, Carol, Research-Based Principles for Developing Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drug Prevention Programs, Center for Prevention Research and Development for Illinois Prevention 2000.

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To receive a complimentary copy of this PreventionAlert, call SAMSHA's National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information (NCADI) @ 1-800-729-6686, TDD 1-800-487-4889 (for the hearing impaired.) PREVENTIONAlert is supported by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and may be copied without permission with appropriate citation. For information about PREVENTIONAlert, please contact CSAP by phone (301) 443-0581 or e-mail gensley@samhsa.gov