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.

This paper was developed to be responsive to the coalition field. It provides evidence to support their use of environmental strategies to address substance abuse in their communities. Environmental strategies are used to change the context (environment) in which substance use and abuse occur.

Gain knowledge about the stages of community readiness by reviewing these descriptions of each stage. Understand how to move to a higher readiness level, and the order of community readiness.

The learning objectives to this resource are becoming familiar with the tasks associated with community organization, learning how to engage a diverse group of stakeholders in prevention planning activities, and learning how to build community ownership of activities by collaborating in planning, implementing and evaluating prevention strategies!

Utilize this resource to become familiar with the community readiness model and the key components, what is community readiness and how to determine when ready to change, the benefits and stages of using the community readiness model, how to conduct a community readiness assessment, and so much!

This publication provides an overview of the environmental strategies approach to community problem solving. It includes real examples of efforts where environmental strategies aimed at preventing and reducing community problems related to alcohol and other drugs were implemented. No one approach or set of strategies will fix every community problem, but with an appropriate environmental assessment, a coalition can determine what aspects of environmental prevention will best serve their community.