Resource Library

Alcohol remains the number one substance used by young people. These 24 legal policy summaries allow you to track how your state regulates underage drinking as compared to other states in order to help inform your prevention work.

To inspire their youth, the Native American Team of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Bureau of Substance Addiction Services gathered stories and poems that highlight their culture. Images from Native American communities are interwoven with the LifeSkills Training© (LST) concepts that can help prevent youth drinking and other drug use. While this book resonates with Native American youth, every student can benefit from the teachings that have existed for thousands of years. It includes tips for teachers to use to guide positive discussions, as well as referral resources.

Note: A free one-day LifeSkills Training session is required to order and use this free resource. A Circle Tied to Mother Earth is a supplement to the LifeSkills Training and will not replace any of the other LifeSkills materials.

A Practitioner's Guide for Advancing Health Equity is designed to help public health practitioners advance health equity through community prevention strategies. While health disparities can be addressed at multiple levels, this guide focuses on policy, systems, and environmental improvements designed to improve the places where people live, learn, work, and play. It is designed for those who are new to the concept of health equity, as well as those who are already working to create equitable environments.

This document is intended to support substance use prevention stakeholders in improving their cultural competency and capacity to serve minority and vulnerable populations. It was created through a literature review of recent academic journal publications and evidence-based resource databases.

Reading scientific articles (sometimes referred to as peer-reviewed articles, journal articles, or scientific papers) can be both intimidating and challenging. However, by approaching articles strategically, prevention professionals can glean a great deal of information from scientific papers or journal articles. Learning how to decipher a journal article is crucial for substance misuse prevention professionals, especially during their work on Step 3 (Planning) of the Strategic Prevention Framework. Actions to complete in this step include identifying evidence-based interventions for implementation that are a good conceptual and practical fit. At times, prevention professionals will need to read journal articles to review the research completed on interventions to determine whether an intervention is an appropriate fit for their community and has sufficient evidence of effectiveness to meet local or state standards of evidence.

This document is a compilation of resources to assist prevention professionals in enhancing their understanding of peer-reviewed journal articles. Topics covered include what “peer-reviewed” means, the purpose of each section of an article, step-by-step instructions on how to read an article, and types of study designs.

This tool is designed to help prevention practitioners better understand where and how to focus efforts to prevent overdose deaths. Specifically, it provides an overview of:

• Risk factors associated with opioid overdose;
• Evidence-based strategies for overdose prevention; and
• Challenges specific to implementing harm reduction strategies.

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.

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.

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

Provides an overview on how ACEs can be overcome with positive childhood development for long-lasting impact.