Youth Drinking, Binging Targeted With $320,000 NYFS Grant

Newtown Youth & Family Services, Inc (NYFS) has been awarded a Partnership for Success Grant from the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. NYFS will be funded $320,000 over the next 4½ years to reduce the percentage of youth reporting they drank alcohol one or more days during the previous 30 days.

The grant will also target binge drinking in attempting to reduce the number of youth who report that they drank five or more drinks on the same occasion on at least one day in the past 30 days (binge drinking).

“The PFS grant gives us an excellent opportunity to enhance the great work that has been done by the Newtown Prevention Council to combat underage drinking in our community,” said Beth Agen, executive director of NYFS, who is also a co-chair of Newtown Prevention Council. “We are taking to heart the mission of the grant and intend to focus like a laser beam on evidence-based practices which will help reduce alcohol consumption.”

Specifically, Ms Agen told The Newtown Bee, the funds would underwrite compensation for one agency staff person and fund initiatives like providing the police with overtime pay to conduct party patrols or surveillance of underage purchases.

Part of the grant would also be devoted to developing or enhancing peer mentoring activities at the high school such as their leadership retreats, Ms Agen said, and for “sticker shock” campaigns that provide liquor permittees with tools to help prevent liquor sales to underage consumers.

As part of fulfilling the grant requirements, NYFS staff will be conducting a needs assessment of the community and working with other prevention council members to update the strategic plan of the council. Work will include identifying contributing factors to the rates of alcohol use in the community.

The previous needs assessment and strategic plan identified social access and low perception of harm as the factors that could be best addressed in Newtown.

“We had a highly successful partnership with the Newtown police, Board of Education, and Health District over the past three years,” said Ms Agen. “I certainly hope that they, and other prevention council members, will recommit to addressing this issue in Newtown. They are our partners and without them much work would go undone.”

The Partnership for Success program, which was awarded to Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, and Tennessee, is designed to help reduce statewide substance abuse rates.

The grants build on the Strategic Prevention Framework, which requires that grantees use a five-step, data-driven planning model to ensure that program services address areas of greatest need. Twenty organizations in Connecticut were awarded the PFS grant for community-level work.