Dunn County Partnership for Youth (Arbor Place, Inc.) - The Dunn County Partnership for Youth (DCPFY) is a county-wide coalition, staffed by the prevention department of Arbor Place, Inc. in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Concern about increasing rates of e-cigs/vaping and Rx drug abuse by teens is mobilizing the coalition to join schools, law enforcement, medical providers, youth serving organizations, and other stakeholder groups to develop and implement programming to decrease the growing use and related problems.
DCPFY's mission statement is "Collaborate with Dunn County resources developing dynamic programming to serve youth and families. Efforts focus on ATOD (alcohol, tobacco, and other drug) related issues, parenting, mental health, youth engagement, and emerging concerns."
The goals are to establish and strengthen collaboration between key stakeholders in communities across that county that can help to prevent youth substance use. These goals will be achieved by implementing several strategies to impact needs identified via student surveys. Tobacco use by teens Dunn County is higher than the state rate and over triple the national rate of underage tobacco use. (These figures don’t even include e-cigs as questions related to vaping nicotine products were just recently added to the states student surveys.) One reason for this high use is that, in underage teens were able to purchase cigarettes, chewing tobacco and e-juice nearly 21.9% of the time in the county, which is much higher than the state rate of 5.8% and also higher than the surrounding counties. Our strategies to reduce teen tobacco use involve working with judges, court elected officials and schools to reduce access to tobacco and/or increase negative consequences for using tobacco/nicotine products. Student use of prescription drugs in Dunn County is also noticeably higher than the national average (3.5% vs. 2%). Our strategies to reduce teen Rx use is to increase the awareness of community members, especially adults, about the importance of monitoring and securing Rx to prevent teen access. We will also increase awareness of Rx disposal events and permanent drop box sites in Dunn County Communities. Lastly we will provide educational sessions on Rx misuse/abuse in High School Health classes and through parent/community education events. Anecdotal data shows an increase in teen depression and anxiety, especially as we move through the COVID crisis. Consequently, our year 7 Action Plan includes implementing a Teen Mental Health First Aid program in county schools.
We anticipate that our efforts during the year seven of funding will engage 300-400 adults, and impact 600-700 youth. In time, impact of the programming, classes and events we offer should increase as our efforts expand across the county, at least tripling the number of parents/adults who learn how to talk with children the dangers of these substance and be provided with resources to seek help if needed.
