Making a Community Impact on Violence
Seven Strategies for Creating Effective Community Change
Identifying a comprehensive selection of evidence-based substance abuse prevention strategies/interventions is vital to implementing effective substance abuse prevention efforts in your community leading to positive change. It is equally vital to implement each of the evidence-based strategies/interventions you select in the most comprehensive manner possible.
CADCA’s Seven Strategies for Creating Effective Community Change can assist your coalition or planning group with identifying appropriate and timely action steps to include in a comprehensive action plan for strategy/intervention implementation.
1. Providing Information
Educational presentations, workshops, and other presentations of data (e.g., public announcements, brochures, billboards, community meetings, town halls, forums, and web-based communication).
2. Enhancing Skills
Workshops, seminars, enrichment, educational, and engaging activities designed to increase the skills of participants, members, and staff needed to achieve population-level outcomes (e.g., training, technical assistance, distance learning, strategic planning retreats, curricula development).
3. Providing Support for Prevention Activities
Creating opportunities to support communities and increase participation in activities/strategies that reduce risk or enhance protection. This includes mentorship programs and educational resources on substance abuse and mental health awareness.
4. Enhancing Access/Reducing Barriers
Improving systems and processes to increase the ease, ability, and opportunity to utilize those systems and services (e.g., assuring healthcare, childcare, transportation, housing, justice, education, safety, special needs, and cultural and language sensitivity). This can include identifying barriers and strategies to overcome them.
5. Changing Consequences (Incentives/Disincentives)
Increasing or decreasing the probability of a specific behavior reduces risk or enhances protection by altering the consequences for performing that behavior (e.g., increasing public recognition for deserved behavior, individual and business rewards, taxes, citations, fines, revocations/loss of privileges).
6. Changing Physical Design/Making Environmental Changes
Changing the physical design or structure of the environment to reduce risk or enhance protection (e.g., parks, landscapes, signage, lighting, outlet density).
7. Modifying/Changing/Developing Policies
Formal change in written procedures, by-laws, proclamations, rules, or laws with written documentation and/or voting procedures (e.g., workplace initiatives, law enforcement procedures, and practices, public policy actions, systems change within government, communities, and organizations).
Coalitions and communities can be more successful in achieving community-level change related to preventing prescription drug abuse when their strategies are part of a comprehensive plan that targets individual youth and adults and also impacts the shared community environment in which we live. Our goals are to create strategies that empower youth to make healthy decisions, as well as create family, school, and community environments that promote and support healthy decision-making by youth.
