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 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.

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.

This primer provides anti-drug coalitions clear guidelines for defining their communities and assessing the real needs within the community. This information will enable your coalition to minimize duplication of effort, understand existing resources and implement practices and policies to reduce substance abuse within the community.

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.

During the first eight months of 2020, police in the U.S killed 164 Black people. This unbridled violence by law enforcement, combined with the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, lay bare the deadly effects of institutional racism on the health of our communities and force us to examine how racist policies contribute to inequitable health outcomes.

This year’s virtual conference, convened by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Substance Addiction Services (BSAS) with support from the Center for Strategic Prevention Support (CSPS), offered prevention practitioners from across the Commonwealth an opportunity to examine our role in perpetuating these inequities and explore potential solutions.

Specifically, participants explored:

• How racism and racist drug policies affect health outcomes
• How the power dynamics present in our communities affect our prevention work, and how we can influence these dynamics
• Ways to restore or develop relationships with community partners, and reimagine what community-led engagement might look like
• Ways to apply a social justice and racial equity lens to our substance misuse prevention work.

The 3-day virtual event included a combination of plenaries, breakout workshops, and panel discussion. Participants were also invited to join optional networking and debrief sessions at the start and end of each conference day.

Attendance from all BSAS funded prevention grantees/programs was mandatory as a condition of funding. Funded programs were represented by the coordinator(s) from the lead cluster community (MOAPC and SAPC) or a designated representative were they not be able to attend.

Plenary Session Recordings

• Full plenary session: https://youtu.be/ymoDSzUzWlU
• Presentation by Dr. Flojaune Cofer (Keynote): https://youtu.be/OMv4YgHJk6s
• Presentation by Dr. Vanessa Hintz (Power Dynamics): https://youtu.be/rTizrVuZO3o
• Presentation by Dr. Obari Cartman (Community Engagement): https://youtu.be/zGZaC5BIrcA
• Presentation by Makani Themba (Social Justice/Practices): https://youtu.be/BII4PY-kbI0
• "Ecologies of Acknowledgment" by Sarah Kanouse: https://vimeo.com/354699007
• "White Privilege" by Kyla Jenée Lacey: https://youtu.be/Qkz5UmXugzk

Workshop Session Recordings

• Power Dynamics (Vanessa Hintz and Albert Gay): https://youtu.be/DdKM2oB3RI0
• Community Engagement (Obari Cartman): https://youtu.be/Jljm0FFfRH0
• Social Justice/Practices (Makani Themba and LaShonda Williamson-Jennings): https://youtu.be/xZPTXhAEuyQ

PowerDynamics WkShop slides can be viewed here: https://prezi.com/view/jCpPYmhz8GBbktZ53x2e/

Closing Session Recording

• Closing: https://youtu.be/AQKpDmDMH0I​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​