- Educate citizens,
- Empower communities.
- Encourage collaboration, and
- Enhance prevention efforts through community mobilization to foster a healthy and positive environment.
Prevention is defined as interventions that occur prior to the onset of a disorder that are intended to prevent or reduce risk for the disorder. Prevention is part of a broader health promotion effort, based on the knowledge that addiction is a primary, progressive, chronic, and fatal disease. As such, it focuses on creating population level changes, within the cultural context, in order to reduce risks and strengthen ability to cope with adversity.
Building coordinated prevention efforts through collaboration with state agencies, community organizations, and special populations offers multiple strategies, provides multiple points of access, and allows for coordination to expand citizen participation in community activity as a most promising approach to preventing alcohol and other drug problems and youth related violence. A comprehensive approach to a particular problem or behavior is an effective way to achieve the desired permanent behavior or normative change.
In order to sustain that coordinated effort, the prevention section of the Division of Behavioral Health Services funds:
||Early Intervention and Prevention Manager
||Grants Analyst-Prevention Block Grant/Partnership for Success - Programs
||Grants Manager - Project LAUNCH
||Administrative Assistant III