Safe Yakima County REACH Coalition - The Safe Yakima REACH Coalition (REACH) was established in 2022 under the following mission statement: To promote healthy and safe communities in Yakima County by preventing and reducing substance misuse among youth and adults through education and advocacy with a focus on the Latino population. Our DFC application is structured in direct response to what our community has voiced as our most pressing youth substance misuse concerns—Alcohol and Marijuana. REACH will engage the collective capacity, competencies, and resources or our partnerships and alliances to infuse the Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) and better position us to serve our mission with proven-effective strategies that 1) inform and support our residents, 2) enhance local assets, and 3) improve the overall context of our community. Yakima County, Washington is in the southcentral region of Washington State with an estimated 256,728 (Census, 2020) people living within a 4,311 sq mile area. Yakima County’s RURAL communities remain culturally, economically, and geographically isolated from much of the state and nation. The residents in Yakima County are mostly Hispanic/Latino (50.6%) and White (41.5%); both groups comprising nearly 92% of the total population. The local economy is not fairing as well as the rest of the country; unemployment (currently at 9.7%) swings between 7% (summer) and 10% (winter), compared to the nation at 3.6%. Lack of employment opportunities creates a sense of economic insecurity throughout Yakima County. Half of the households in Yakima County are 33% below the state average income. Two in five families require some form of public assistance such as food stamps and the poverty rate (14.8%) are nearly 2/3rds higher than the state (9.5%). This coupled with the geographic characteristics of the region has proven ideal for a vigorous illicit drug trade that includes heroin and methamphetamines. Working in close collaboration with several local governmental entities, school districts, police departments, and service partners, REACH will engage in a variety of environmental strategies to achieve the following outcomes: 1) Reduce 30-day Alcohol Use among 10th grade students from the current 2021 baseline of 21% to 19.5% (-1.5) by 2025 as measured by the Washington HYS – Yakima School District. (2028 goal: 3-point net decrease. Target: 18% or lower.) 2) Reduce 30-day Marijuana Use among 10th grade students from the current 2021 baseline of 21% to 18% (-3) by 2025 as measured by the Washington HYS – Yakima School District. (2028 goal: 9-point net decrease. Target 12% or lower.) To achieve this end, REACH will target middle and high school age youth and their families with the following strategies to be implemented in the first year and sustained through the 5-year project: 1) Securing the infrastructure and capacity to address substance misuse prevention through wide-ranging community collaboration, 2) Improving coalition competency through trainings and education, 3) Increasing awareness of the issues around alcohol and marijuana with multimodal communications, 4) Enhancing parenting skills to buffer exposure to negative influences, 5) Implementing a comprehensive prevention media campaign targeting alcohol and marijuana, 6) Enhancing school-based student prevention clubs with training and activity support, 7) Advocating for school drug and alcohol response policy reviews and updates, 8) Conducting outreach targeting under-resourced, underrepresented communities, and 9) Improving access to prevention resources for parents and their families.
