Resource Library

Information on advocacy principles, advocacy research, providing education, direct action campaigns, media advocacy, and responding to opposition.

This resource provides an overview of some common barriers to obtaining archival data, and strategies for overcoming these challenges.

This 90-minute session will build off the previous sessions in the data collection series and focus on the challenges specific to working with schools and parents. These partners can be essential in supporting the data needed for prevention planning and implementation. However, these partners can also present unique challenges and road blocks to collecting, sharing, and understanding the role data plays in prevention. This training will be highly interactive and its success relies on participants to share, discuss, and work through their challenges and successes and to be open to learning from others.

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist that blocks the effects of opioids such as heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl, codeine, and methadone. In response to the increasing number of opioid-related fatal overdoses in Massachusetts, the Department of Public Health is sponsoring a pilot program that is distributing intra-nasal naloxone (Narcan©), along with opioid overdose prevention education, to opioid users and to trusted people in their lives such as family, friends, and staff of human services programs. Emergency responders including paramedics and emergency room physicians have been using naloxone since the 1970's to revive people who are experiencing an opioid overdose. Many programs nationally, and now here in Massachusetts have been making this life-saving medication available to people who are most likely to witness an overdose.

This guidance document is a resource for municipalities, individuals, organizations, community coalitions, and other groups who are implementing efforts to prevent prescription drug misuse and abuse among high school aged youth, including those whose efforts are funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) Bureau of Substance Abuse Services (BSAS), and more specifically, grantees of the Partnership For Success 2015 cohort.

This publication provides an overview of the steps associated with engaging in community mobilizing to implement environmental strategies with a particular emphasis on adopting alcohol, tobacco, and drug (ATD) policies at the community level.

This guide provides guidance for developing a logic model specific to the PFS grant, a logic model examples, as well as a logic model template.

This primer provides clear guidelines for assisting your coalition to develop the products that you need to carry out a comprehensive community plan to reduce substance abuse rates. It also helps you understand the dynamic planning process needed for coalition work.

Public health and commercial tobacco prevention practitioners have increasingly centered equity in policy development to ensure that policies to combat commercial tobacco–related harms do not unintentionally perpetuate or exacerbate health disparities. This shift includes efforts to improve evaluation activities to better measure health equity impacts related both to outcomes and to how the policy was developed and implemented.

The lists of sample metrics in this resource provide local policymakers, public health practitioners, and community groups with a foundation for further conversation about how we measure the community impact of the policy process. These non-exhaustive lists stem from research across the field of public health; only some correspond to existing examples in commercial tobacco. In time, we hope to share examples of each metric at work and to update the research as we continue to learn from our partners.

The lists and accompanying research in this tool aim to provide . . .

• Inspiration for new and deeper partnerships throughout the policy process — for example, between local decision makers, partner agencies, community-based organizations, health care partners, other service providers, and residents
• Data metrics and supporting evidence to help ground and inspire new approaches to evaluating the policy process
• Avenues for building a network of communities that are making this shift in their approaches to evaluation provisions and plans

The Population Health Information Tool (PHIT) is a data portal for Massachusetts health data. As a service of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, PHIT aims to provide data for a healthier Massachusetts.

Learn about the potential challenges to obtaining useful epidemiological and other data during prevention planning.

Cocaine use in the United States has begun to rise in the past few years, and indicators suggest it will continue to rise, at greater levels, in the coming years. This issue brief is designed to help prevention practitioners better understand and prevent this growing problem.

Provides an overview of how ACES impact health and opportunity what can be done to prevent them.

• Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) come in many forms and can have long-term impacts on health and well-being into adulthood. This free online training designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention helps faith, spiritual, and religious leaders, staff members, volunteers, and others who serve children and families understand their role in preventing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). They will learn:
  • What ACEs are and how they impact lifelong health, opportunity, and wellbeing
  • How to identify ACE risk factors and promote protective factors
  • How faith, spiritual, and religious communities can prevent ACEs or lessen their effects

This issues brief is designed to help substance abuse prevention practitioners better understand and prevent the growing problem of heroin use. Specifically, it provides: an overview of recent trends in heroin use and related consequences; information on national, state and local data sources for heroin-related indicators; an inventory of research-based risk and protective factors associated with heroin use; and evidence-based strategies for preventing heroin use.