Wednesday, April 30, 2025
4/30/2025
Community Advocates MCSAP Coalition Drug-Free Communities Support Program - Community Advocates MCSAP Coalition Drug-Free Communities Support Program Project Abstract, including Community Overview The Milwaukee County Substance Abuse Prevention (MCSAP) coalition seeks to continue youth substance abuse prevention activities in Milwaukee’s 53206 zip code, the most impoverished and disadvantaged area in our city. MCSAP and our Youth Work Group “MCSAP Junior” are engaging 53206 youth, families, and policy-makers with evidence-based prevention strategies to create community-level change around youth substance use. In the past five years, MCSAP has created an annual youth summit, an LGBTQ+ youth substance abuse summit, the first drug take-back event in 53206, youth-led media campaigns, and dialog with retailers and community stakeholders to address easy youth access to and acceptance of substances in 53206. Led by our youth and guided by their needs, MCSAP plans to intensify our efforts to prevent youth alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use, and change community norms now and in the generations to come. While Milwaukee overall has a 26.6% poverty rate, the unique socioeconomic patterns here have led to pockets of racially homogenous economic and social distress. Among the city’s high-need African American areas, one zip code—53206—stands out. As UW-Milwaukee economist Marc Levine wrote, “‘Milwaukee 53206’ is a neighborhood of concentrated poverty, pervasive joblessness, plunging incomes, and mass incarceration—a neighborhood of ‘cumulative disadvantages,’ each reinforcing the other […].” In this “ecosystem of disadvantage,” as Levine puts it, live the 22,766 residents of 53206, who are 95% African American, compared to the City of Milwaukee’s 38% African American population. The median age is 28.3; 31% are under 18. 53% are female, while 47% are male. Although the country as a whole has rebounded from the recent Great Recession, the recovery hasn’t reached the 53206 zip code. A staggering 41% of 53206 residents live in poverty and the unemployment rate is 17%. The median household income is $23,491. Children are paying the price. A full 81.4% of children in these neighborhoods live in households receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI), cash public assistance income, or Food Stamp/SNAP benefits. Their life expectancy is 12 years less than their affluent peers in the north shore suburbs. The Milwaukee Public Schools, like most urban school districts, struggles with poor academic performance, high poverty, high special-needs students, high absenteeism, and poor graduation rates. 53206 is notorious for its high incarceration rates of African American men. One study found that Wisconsin had an incarceration rate of 12.8% for working-age African American men, almost double the national average of 6.7%. In August 2019, 598 inmates in state prisons were from 53206, the highest number for any zip code in the state. Youth growing up in 53206 are raised in neighborhoods that seem to encourage substance use. They are growing up in high-crime environments where it is normal to observe drug deals in broad daylight, and alcohol and marijuana are readily available, even to middle school-age youth. Our community surveys show easy acceptance of youth substance use, especially of marijuana, to cope with multigenerational trauma and stress. MCSAP and MCSAP Junior seek to continue our community-level interventions to enable 53206 African American youth to live substance-free and to reach their full potential as individuals and as community leaders, thereby reducing social and racial disparities and changing the narrative about this distressed but resilient community.
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).