Resource Library

For a change as crucially important as closing health equity gaps, health care leaders need to anticipate some pushback. This article provides guidance for health care leaders to effectively prepare for and address pushback on health equity, including using data and stories to harness curiosity as an antidote to fear and resistance.

This tool presents examples from four states to help evaluators and other data collectors improve sample representativeness and survey response rates when gathering primary data.

We have long known that substance use is driven by a complex set of factors and circumstances. Each of our decisions is influenced by our circumstances, consciously and unconsciously. That’s why substance use prevention should be comprehensive – addressing as many of the primary drivers of substance use as possible. Recently, there has been a push to encourage health care stakeholders to focus on how the context of our lives affects our health, notably in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Healthy People 2030 initiative. The factors that comprise this context are referred to collectively as the social determinants of health (SDOH). This brief will explain the SDOH, map the concept of SDOH onto more “traditional” prevention frameworks, and explain how substance use prevention can play a role in such large-scale changes.

An online learning series for operationalizing racial justice in day-to-day organizational life

ARJ Online is a learning series to guide members of race, equity, and inclusion teams in designing a “do-it-yourself” racial equity change process within their organizations and networks.

This report offers a groundbreaking framework for understanding the relationship between community trauma and violence. Until now, there has been no basis for understanding how community trauma undermines both individual and community resilience, especially in communities highly impacted by violence, and what can be done about it. Based on interviews with practitioners in communities with high rates of violence, the report outlines specific strategies to address and prevent community trauma—and foster resilience—using techniques from those living in affected areas.

This toolkit supports planning for advocacy efforts and responding to opposition.

The Alcohol Awareness Toolkit seeks to do the following:

• Raise awareness about alcohol-related harms and the importance of strong alcohol policies using memes, and
• Encourage engagement from prevention and public health stakeholders to strategically educate and inform decision makers about effective alcohol policies by providing easy-to-personalize, templated opinion editorials, letters to legislators and proclamations.

The alcohol industry knows its message: That alcohol is part of having fun, having friends, playing sports, or being sexy or manly. This webinar will focus on the influence of advertising and alcohol industry practices on underage drinking. Presenters will provide a thorough inspection of industry practices that get kids’ attention with a special emphasis on emerging high risk alcohol products, which are defined as products that are produced, marketed or advertised in a way that creates an unreasonable risk of being attractive to teens or kids. Presenters describe and provide examples in 7 categories of high risk products, such as products designed to be “healthy”, youthfully packaged, flavorings, and the creation of alcohol versions of beverages that are traditionally teen oriented (and non-alcoholic). The session will also examine the role of social media in promoting these products.

The webinar will be presented by members of Dover Youth to Youth, a nationally recognized youth empowerment program based in Dover, NH. The webinar will also include an overview of the Dover program, their model of youth empowerment, and examples of advocacy taken in response to alcohol industry practices and influences on underage drinking. Attendees will be provided with access to training materials sufficient to allow them to replicate a “High Risk Alcohol Products” awareness presentation in their own community. This training is ideal for community coalitions addressing underage drinking and other prevention professionals, particularly those working with youth advocates.

The alcohol marketplace is changing quickly, from direct shipment and third-party delivery services to cocktails to-go and curbside pickup, requiring enforcement, prevention, and public health stakeholders to react with creative solutions and strategies to regulate and enforce this new environment. This webinar will review the current alcohol policy landscape and alcohol consumption trends and how both have changed during the Covid-19 pandemic and discuss effective strategies that work to prevent alcohol-related harm with a spotlight on one state’s efforts to track and monitor the alcohol home delivery environment. 

Alcohol has a significant impact on health and safety in Massachusetts. Yet debates about alcohol policy in the Commonwealth often center on economic effects and the role of alcohol as a business and a generator of revenue. The purpose of this report is to add to those debates the best available evidence on alcohol from a health and safety perspective. Beginning with a review of what we know about drinking patterns in the Bay State, the report then reviews evidence of harms, and both the revenues and the costs generated by alcohol use in the state. The report concludes with a review of alcohol policies in Massachusetts, putting them in the context of research indicating which policies are most effective in reducing alcohol-related harm, and how other states treat alcohol from a policy perspective.

This annotated bibliography provides links to online compilations of reliable, valid, and standard measures of behavioral health indicators and outcomes.

Information about analyzing community problems to design, choose, and adapt interventions for different cultures and communities.

This toolkit helps in analyzing personal and environmental factors that influence the problem to be addressed.

This three-hour professional development module is intended to educate different service providers, community members, coalitions, and other entities on the War on Drugs and how it has fostered racialized drug policies in the 21st century. Like alcohol Prohibition in the early 1900s, drug prohibition has not only failed its mission but has made its mission impossible. This training will build off the previous module (Addressing Stigmas and Biases in Our Work) and will explore the history of the War on Drugs, while connecting it to the 3 different levels of racism.

We will also explore racialized drug policies throughout U.S. history, and come to an understanding of how the drug war has fueled mass incarceration, health disparities, social inequities, and the current waves of overdose deaths in the United States. Helpful frameworks, such as the Iceberg Analogy, will allow participants to connect how certain events are fueled by underlying racial structures. Participants will also brainstorm tactics and strategies to address some of the ramifications of the War on Drugs in their own communities. 

This toolkit provides guidance for conducting assessments of community needs and resources.