Cultural Competence Primer: Incorporating Cultural Competence into Your Comprehensive Plan

This primer provides anti-drug coalitions with a basic understanding of cultural competence and its importance in achieving substance abuse reduction that is effective and sustainable. If you know how to include all major sectors of your community in your efforts to develop a plan to create population-level change in community rates of substance abuse, then you likely will increase your chances of success.

The Handbook for Community Anti-Drug Coalitions provides an overview of resources for and about community coalitions. It helps educate, inform and empower local coalitions and provides some of the basic tools needed to become effective and sustainable.

This primer provides the basic tools each coalition needs to develop a comprehensive evaluation plan. In addition, it will help your coalition create and implement a local evaluation.

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.

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.

“Sustainability” is a term that we hear more and more often in relation to coalition work. Whether in discussions about our natural environment or a new community program, the questions on the minds of many funders, leaders and community stakeholders are… “Does what we are doing make sense as a long-term strategy? and…can we keep this up?”

This primer assists your coalition in the implementation of comprehensive strategies designed to achieve population-level reductions of substance abuse rates. It describes the importance of community mobilization and the necessity of seeking meaningful environmental change—two strategies that research indicates can influence substance abuse rates in an entire community.