Togiak Youth Cayaillkutaq - Within our community of Togiak, we envision a resilient, substance misuse-free community that is knowledgeable and supportive of the behavioral health needs of its members-especially youth-to promote the growth of healthy, culturally-rooted generations. We believe it is vital to take a trauma-informed approach using the key principles of empowerment, voice, and choice as our people should retain autonomy within—and ownership of—their path to healing from trauma and preventing future substance misuse and suicide. Our project, Togiak Youth Cayaillkutaq , will primarily support Alaska Native youth ages 5-24 who attend the Togiak School. Our proposed objectives are rooted in community and culture. We believe it is the role of all members of the community to guide our youth to develop resilience and problem-solving skills to help them navigate adversity they may face in their lifetime and cope in healthy ways. We are approaching program development with a trauma-informed lens to develop a behavioral health system rooted in self-determination and empowerment. It is vital for Togiak as a community to have control over its well-being, empowering our people—particularly our youth—to share this responsibility of reducing substance misuse and preventing suicidal behaviors. We will utilize a public health approach rooted in cultural competence to implement our activities. Through our activities, we will grow our own staff to develop a community behavioral health system that is culturally grounded, community-led, and therefore more sustainable using SAMHSA's Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) centered around the social-ecological model to develop our program and implement our activities. We believe prevention needs a holistic approach to addressing risk and protective factors. We anticipate serving 200 (primarily Alaska Native) youth ages 5-24 and an additional 100 adult community members (parents/guardians, school staff, Elders, leadership, and key stakeholders) annually. Over the lifetime of the project, we hope to reach at least 75% (600 unique people) of the population in Togiak as we engage the community in our activities to support our youth and teach them about community and resilience. Our three main goals are to: 1) Implement culturally based interventions to address trauma in the community, increase community resilience, and ultimately create a sustainable community-based behavioral health system; 2) Prevent and reduce suicidal behavior in AN/AI youth by increasing access to culturally appropriate, traditionally grounded behavioral health services in the Togiak School for ages 5 to 24; and 3) Decrease youth substance use in Togiak by implementing culturally based, trauma-informed interventions to address the behaviors that may lead to their use.
