Home| About Us| Expertise| Programs and Products| Contract Vehicles| Employment| Contact Us
Programs and Products National Technical Assistance Centers Children, Youth, and Families Communications Clinical Research Health Research Services Community Mobilization Drug-Free Workplace Special Populations

Community Mobilization

CDM provided more than 10 years of technical assistance to community partnerships and coalitions around the country, responding individually to requests for assistance by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention's 254 Community Partnerships and 125 Community Prevention Coalitions nationwide. Our field experts identified and addressed cultural values and distinctions within the community and among partnership members.  We identified appropriate community-wide substance abuse prevention models to meet local conditions, design community outreach activities, and help identify and recruit local volunteers. CDM improved the management of  individual partnership sites by helping grantees to set attainable goals and objectives, create strategic planning processes, establish processes to manage and resolve conflict, and develop strategies to institutionalize the grantee program. We improved program administration by determining appropriate organizational and governing structures to best meet the needs of each individual partnership. We helped set up management and administrative systems to ensure financial accountability, program supervision, quality control, and personnel management.

Thousands of organizations exist across the country — from youth education clubs, to parent, religious, and civic organizations, to police, courts, and social service agencies — where millions of people interact at the community level to improve their daily lives.  Yet often the efforts of these groups remain fragmented and separate. Working alone, they are not always able to combat health problems, such as substance abuse for example, in their communities. Combining the strengths of these organizations and incorporating evidence-based prevention practices into their missions leads to a more comprehensive and successful effort to improve the overall quality of life for the community.
 

For the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, CDM created materials specifically designed to help communities mobilize to prevent alcohol use by youth. These include

  • Keep Kids Alcohol Free: Strategies for Action PDF Version | HTML Version
    A brochure that describes three basic strategies for preventing alcohol use by children ages 9-15 and ways these strategies can be applied in the home, the school, and the community. It has been designed as a starting point for parents, teachers, health professionals, law enforcement personnel, alcohol retailers, policy makers, and others who want to take action against early alcohol use.
  • Fred Friendly Seminar Videos and Discussion Guide—Alcohol and Kids: Do Not Mix
    These videos present viewpoints and dilemmas facing youth, adults, and communities dealing with the issue of alcohol use by children. The seminar uses the Fred Friendly Socratic dialogue, a format that supports exploration of various perspectives and compels participants to confront the choices they would make in complex situations. As Fred Friendly explained, “Our job is . . . to make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking.” All of the panelists participating in this seminar have experience with issues concerning children drinking. They are asked to role-play citizens of an imaginary community and to answer unrehearsed questions about hypothetical situations posed by a moderator. The resulting discussion is lively, spontaneous, and compelling. As viewers watch the panelists work through difficult decisions, they invariably find themselves drawn into thinking about the many facets of the problems related to youth alcohol use.