Resource Library

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.

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.

This publication provides an overview of qualitative data – how it can be used as a valid and reliable data collection process, how a coalition can engage in several qualitative data collection methodologies, and how to utilize qualitative data in all phases of the coalition problem-solving process as informed by the Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) process. Additionally, this publication discusses how coalitions should update their qualitative data to continually inform problem analysis, strategy selection and implementation as well as replicate qualitative data collection to measure success.

Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development is a project within the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. We identify, recommend, and disseminate programs for youth, families and communities that, based on scientific evaluations, have strong evidence of effectiveness. The Blueprints mission is to provide a registry of evidence-based interventions that are effective in reducing antisocial behavior and promoting a healthy course of youth development and adult maturity.