Learn about marijuana legalization in certain states of the U.S. and how this policy has impacted public health, prevention, crime, policy, and other outcomes. The session will also cover SAM’s efforts to expand a harm prevention approach to drug policy and what the successes and failures have been across the country.

CADCA’s Model for community problem solving is designed to create partnerships between governments and civil society through the development of community coalitions capable of preventing and reducing substance misuse at the local level.  CADCA’s training programs provide local communities with the basic knowledge, skills and abilities to mobilize and organize local communities through civic engagement and to develop the necessary structures and capacity to form an effective drug prevention community coalition. 

Through CADCA trainings, community leaders and residents also learn the essential competencies that help to create a safer, healthier culture needed to bring about reductions – at the community level – in substance misuse rates through individual and environmental behavioural change strategies.  Currently, there is a global movement of over 5,000 community coalitions throughout all 50 states and territories in the United States and in 27 countries throughout the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Central and Southeast Asia that have adapted and adopted the model to their local context working towards creating safer, healthier and drug free communities.  

Project VENDA by the Fourth Wave Foundation, adopts a multi-stakeholder approach to turn interventions into a community movement.  Fourth Wave Foundation shares its experience in collaborating with various levels and types of stakeholders to equip children with the values, skills, and knowledge needed, to protect them from a range of risk situations.

The primary focus of Project VENDA, (VENDA is the vernacular for NO), is to empower Children to say NO to the menace of drugs that’s eating at the core of their future. 
Project VENDA’s Philosophy - A community is where a child grows and we as adults need to be held accountable if our children do not gain essential knowledge regarding their wellbeing and cannot articulate a value position. 
Project VENDA works closely with the community and has been able to make its interventions into a movement within the communities we have worked with. 

“Choose Recovery” is a research and outreach project by the NGO Celebrate Recovery. The project is approaching its fourth year of implementation in Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro.  Celebrate Recovery representative will share findings on its outreach work since the project’s conception, as well as its multidisciplinary approach to facilitate the recovery and re-integration for drug addicts. “Choose Recovery” operates on the tenet that drug addiction intervention cannot be executed in isolation, and demonstrates the importance of outreach to NGO services to address the problem more fully.

Learn how SELF Philippines had developed the Therapeutic Community (TC) approach for the Asian setting by involving the family in the treatment process. The speaker will elaborate on five elements that define the model, and talk about establishing Healthy Family Operating Systems used in community-based programs as a bid towards effective aftercare.