United Prevention is a community-based substance use prevention coalition serving the cities of Surprise and El Mirage in Arizona. The coalition was established in 2022 and is comprised of a multi-sector membership with key partners across public health, public safety and across the continuum of substance use prevention, treatment and recovery. United Prevention’s mission is “Working to unite Surprise and El Mirage to prevent adult substance misuse and youth substance use while promoting strong, healthy, and safe communities through education, training, and collaboration.”
United Prevention proposes to use a set of community-based strategies and action items to reduce the prevalence and impact of youth alcohol, marijuana, nicotine, and opioid use. Strategies to increase community collaboration and coalition capacity include increasing member participation and enhancing skills of the coalition members and key partners through continued and evolving topical trainings on best practices in prevention science. Strategies to reduce youth substance use for the four target substances and associated public health problems include providing information, enhancing skills, providing support, and enhancing access/improving connections. Promoting youth coping and resiliency, addressing perceived risk, increasing the frequency and quality of caregiver-child communication, increasing youth involvement in prosocial activities and reducing access to the target substances are at the core of our program.
Short-term outcomes include increasing collaboration and diversity of our coalition, knowledge and skills related to prevention science, and increasing health and wellness opportunities for youth. Intermediate outcomes include increasing perceived risk, decreasing access, increasing parent-child communication, increasing awareness about the effects of social media use on youth health and wellness and increasing youth prosocial involvement and resiliency skills. Long-term outcomes include reducing youth prevalence rates of past 30 day use of alcohol, marijuana, nicotine, and opioids; reducing substance use disparities among our youth related to mental health, coping and resiliency factors; and reducing overdose rates among youth and young adults in the Surprise and El Mirage community.
