Sunday, November 24, 2024
11/24/2024
Project Name: Healthy Lincoln County STOP Act Healthy Lincoln County (HLC)’s STOP Act project seeks to expand and build on our Drug Free Community (DFC) Coalition efforts to prevent and reduce underage drinking in rural Lincoln County, Maine. Our project aims to 1) decrease underage drinking by decreasing youth access to alcohol and increasing youth perception that they would be caught by parents, and 2) increase youth protective factors by increasing youth mattering and sense of support from adults. We aim to achieve a 10% improvement in each of these indicators by 2025 and a 20% improvement by 2027 as measured by the Maine Youth Integrated Health Survey (MIYHS). HLC’s Substance Use Prevention Partnership (SUPP) serves all 34.457 residents of Lincoln County with a focus on serving middle and high school students and their parents (approximately 7,000 people). Our coastal county is entirely rural, with 19 towns, one island, and 77.3 people per square mile. The 2021 Lincoln County Shared Community Health Needs Assessment indicates that 16.4% of children in our county live in poverty, compared to the 13.8% Maine benchmark. According to the 2021 MIYHS, our middle school and high school binge drinking rates are higher than the state average, as are our middle school 30-day alcohol use, tobacco use, and lifetime marijuana use rates. Our high school heroin, ecstasy, and methamphetamine lifetime use rates are also higher than the state’s. 38.7% of our high school students report living with an adult who has had a problem with alcohol or drugs, compared to 32.8% statewide. Despite our rurality, Lincoln County has 163 liquor-licensed establishments, including both on-premises and off-premises retailers, and our 2019 and 2021 MIYHS had a higher percentage of middle school and high school youth reporting that alcohol would be “easy” or “very easy” than statewide. Our STOP Act project will build on existing efforts with new strategies including community trainings, media strategies, and awareness events to reduce furnishing/sales of alcohol to minors; parent education events, messaging, and communications to increase parental monitoring practices; youth-led community forums and media strategies to increase youth mattering; and school policy changes to reduce exclusionary discipline practices and increase youth sense of having support from adults. Our project will serve approximately 7,000 youth and parents per year, with a cumulative impact of roughly 14,000 individuals over 4 years. HLC is part of the State of Maine’s coordinated prevention infrastructure, the Maine Prevention Network (MPN), via a contract with MaineHealth to implement prevention services, including youth alcohol prevention in Lincoln County. MPN is a collaborative effort of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and community partners that coordinates work across the state to prevent obesity, tobacco, and other substance use. In addition, HLC is part of the Maine Network of Healthy Communities and the Midcoast Public Health Council, which are coordinated groups who meet and collaborate on relevant public health issues.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
