FTCTC Exe. Director Update April 5, 2010

Five Town Communities That Care

May 5, 2010 Executive Director's Update

Vol 2, Issue 16

Dear Board, Work Group Members, and Staff;

What a wonderous spring we are having! As I sit here the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the breezes are warm!

Sorry for the delay in my update. April was just crazy for me with trips to both San Antonio and Albuquerque thrown in! I am glad to be home.

Important Dates

Board of Directors Meeting: May 5@8:30AM at the CTC offices in Rockport

Program Evaluation Work Group Meeting: May 13@ 10:30AM at the CTC offices in Rockport

Coalition Maintenance Work Group Meeting: May 18@8:30AM (location TBD)

Harvest Hootenanny Planning Meeting: May 21@1PM at the CTC Offices

STAR Cycle 19 Celebration: June 3 at Hope Elementary School, 6PM.

Quick Links

Caesar Fax

MANP Principles & Practices Online

Maine Prevention Calendar

CADCA

Conferences and Trainings

Psychological First Aid (PFA) Training:

This program is a six hour, interactive, face-to-face training that provides public health professionals, emergency responders, and natural community helpers without former mental health education with the concepts and skills associated with psychological first aid. Additionally, this training is applicable to public health settings, the workplace, the military, mass disaster venues, and even the demands of critical incidents, e.g., dealing with the psychological aftermath of accidents, robberies, suicide, homicide, or community violence.
May 26, 2010 Northern Maine Medical Center, Fort Kent. Find More Information and Registration ONLINE at: www.neias.org/mecdc/pfa2010.html Questions? E-mail Tammy McLaughlin at tmclaughlin@neias.org.

DFC News

The Mentoring Grant to work with the Greater Old Town Community was submitted and accepted for screening and potential review. If approved, we would expect to hear back in late summer.

Our quarterly financial reports were submitted as required, and we are in the process of updating our Coalition's six-month progress report via the online COMET system. The report must be finalized by May 10.

Tobey Manns-Royal, our liason at the DFC program had requested additional information regarding our year three plan; that was submitted as requested.

STAR

Our final cycle for the school year is nearly done! It has just flown by. The celebration is scheduled for the evening of June 3rd at 6PM @ Hope Elementary School. If you can help with the celebration, please contact Tug at 975-6722.

Table Talks

We have been awarded a small grant from SAMHSA to conduct a series of Table Talks in the community. These are small, intimate gathers of parents who know one another where a facilitator takes the group through a series of exercises related to youth alcohol use.

We are currently seeking parents of middle-schoolers to act as hosts for the Table Talks. For more information, contact Sheryl Whittier at the FTCTC offices (236-9800 or mentors@fivetownctc.org).

Quarterly Coalition Meeting

Congratulations to last quarter's Youth Advocate Winners! Our individual winner was the Reverend Adam Kohlstrom and the organization honored was Tanglewood 4-H Camp and Learning Center.

The meeting on May 4 at the Blue Sky Cantina was rather lightly attended (26 persons) but well-received. The keynote speaker was Melanie Lanctot of the Maine Office of Substance Abuse. Ms. Lanctot was followed by a presentation from Executive Director Dalene Dutton on current "hot topics" in prevention. The meeting closed after a networking session where attendees shared upcoming opportunities, needs, and news.

At the meeting a "Five Town CTC Coalition Endorsement Form" was distributed, asking for people to formally acknowledge their endorsement of the mission and vision of Five Town Communities That Care. If you did not attend, and would consider making your support of what we do public, please download the form and mail it in to us (http://www.fivetownctc.org/wp-content/uploads/EndorsementRequest.pdf).

PLEASE SEND IN NOMINATIONS for Youth Advocate Award winners. If you know of an individual or agency / group doing great things for our local kids, send an email along with their name and why you think they should be honored as a youth advocate. There are great people out there who are doing great things for kids...get their names in so that we can honor them!

Work Group and Board Meetings

The Board of Directors met on 4/12. Minutes are available at the FTCTC office.

The Community Outreach and Public Relations Work Group has meet twice since my last update (on 4/6 and 4/27). They are moving forward with a print campaign celebrating organizations and businesses that have been partnering with Five Town Communities That Care. Recent UMO graduate Cassie Kinney has been helping with layout and graphic design. This campaign should run for the next five months or so. They also continue to work on the radio PSA campaign targeting low commitment to school.

The Program Evaluation Work Group met on 4/20. They finished up the review of data from STAR cycle 18 during that meeting.

The Coalition Maintenance Work Group met on 4/27. They addressed the upcoming Coalition Meeting and tackled how different levels of involvement with our work might be formally defined, and participants for different levels attracted. They also briefly discussed the need for an organizational retreat in the fall and reviewed the possible roles for the work group.

The Funding Work Group met on 4/30. Topics discussed included the June MCC benefit concert, the Holiday Home Tour (during Christmas by the Sea) and the Harvest Hootenanny.

Quick Updates

Five Town CTC Board Treasurer Eric Waters and I met to finalize the draft organizational budget on 4/30. The budget will be considered by the Board of Directors at is next meeting.

Hope Elementary School staff participated in a two-hour "Inhalants 101" training on 4/29. This staff meeting was followed later in the evening by a presentation for parents. Attendance at the parent session was very light (4 persons) but the information was well received.

From Maine's Office of Substance Abuse

MARCH 2010 ISSUE OF ALCOHOLISM: CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH STUDY FINDS OFF-PREMISE ALCOHOL OUTLETS LINKED DRINKING-RELATED INJURIES IN YOUNG ADULTS

· Alcohol research has clearly demonstrated a connection between alcohol outlets and alcohol-related problems.
· A new study focuses on the effects of alcohol outlets on underage youth and young adults.
· Findings show that alcohol-related injuries among underage youth and young adults are shaped by the density and types of alcohol outlets in neighborhoods.

Prior studies have not only demonstrated a clear connection between alcohol outlets and alcohol-related problems, they have also shown that certain types of outlets are associated with different types of problem outcomes. A new study shows that a particular group, underage youth and young adults, have specific problems - injury accidents, traffic crashes, and assaults that are related to specific types of alcohol outlets - off-premise outlets, bars and restaurants.

Results will be published in the March 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Over the past four decades, public health researchers have come to recognize that although most drinkers safely purchase and enjoy alcohol from alcohol outlets, these places are also associated with serious alcohol-related problems among young people and adults," said Paul J. Gruenewald, senior research scientist at the Prevention Research Center and corresponding author for the study.

"In the early studies, researchers believed associations were due to increased alcohol consumption related to higher alcohol outlet densities," added Richard Scribner, D'Angelo Professor of Alcohol Research at the LSU School of Public Health. "However, as the research area has matured, the relations appear to be far more complex. It seems that alcohol outlets represent an important social institution within a neighborhood. As a result, their effects are not limited to merely the consequences of the sale of alcohol."

For this study, researchers obtained non-public hospital discharge data from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, including residential zip code and patient age for all patients discharged. Ninety-nine percent of the injury records were successfully mapped to zip codes. Population demographics, place characteristics, and data related to alcohol outlets were also collected from various sources, and modeled in relation to two age groups: underage youth between 18 and 20 years of age, and of-age young adults 21 to 29 years of age.

"Greater numbers of off-premise outlets such as take-out establishments were associated with greater injuries from accidents, assaults, and traffic crashes for both underage and of-age young adults," said Gruenewald. "But only among of-age young adults were greater number of restaurants related to traffic crash injuries and greater numbers of bars related to assault injuries. These findings confirm previous observations that drinking at bars may be a particular risk for aggression and alcohol-related assaults while drinking at restaurants may be a particular risk for drunken driving and alcohol-related traffic crashes. The findings also confirm prior studies that indicate underage risks are uniquely associated with off-premise establishments."

"In other words," said Scribner, "the pattern of alcohol-related injuries among underage youth and young adults is not random; their occurrence is shaped by the density and type of alcohol outlets in a neighborhood. For example, when young adults reach the minimum legal drinking age, they begin legally drinking in bars where events such as bar fights are relatively common, and more likely when the density of bars increases. A little more complex is the strong association between an increasing density of off-premise outlets such as convenience stores and liquor stores, and higher rates of all injury outcomes among both underage youth and young adults. The authors indicate this association may be related to broader social factors where the concentration of these types of alcohol outlets in a neighborhood influences the social networks of both youth and young adults by reinforcing high-risk drinking practices. Clearly this type of research can help to develop informed policy in areas where high rates of youth injuries are considered a problem." The key message, said both Gruenewald and Scribner, is that a neighborhood's alcohol environment plays a role in regulating the risks that youth and young adults will be exposed to as they mature.

"From a prevention perspective, this represents an important refocusing of priorities, away from targeting the individual to targeting the community," said Scribner. "This is hopeful because a community-based approach that addresses the over concentration of alcohol outlets in a neighborhood where youth injuries are a problem is relatively easy compared with interventions targeting each youth individually."

Articles were written based on the following published research:
Paul J. Gruenewald, Bridget Freisthler, Lillian Remer, Elizabeth A. LaScala, Andrew J. Treno, and William R. Ponicki. (March 2010). Ecological associations of alcohol outlets with underage and young adult injuries. Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (ACER). 34(3): 519-527
Funding for this Addiction Science Made Easy project is provided by the Addiction Technology Transfer Center National Office, under the cooperative agreement from the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment of SAMHSA.

SOURCE: Addiction Technology Transfer Center Network, Eye On The Field, March 2010, vol. 11, iss. 3.

From the National Institutes on Health (NIH):

DIET QUALITY WORSENS AS ALCOHOL INTAKE INCREASES

People who drink more are also likely to eat less fruit and consume more calories from a combination of alcoholic beverages and foods high in unhealthy fats and added sugars, according to a new study by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

To read the full article go to http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2010/niaaa-25.htm

From Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA):

Genetic Risk Factors for both Marijuana and Alcohol Abuse Similar

A new study has found that use and misuse of alcohol and marijuana are influenced by a common set of genes. The results are in the March 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. Read more at http://www.cadca.org/resources/detail/genetic-risk-factors-both-marijuana-and-alcohol-abuse-similar

in closing...

This weekend marks an important milestone in the life of my oldest daughter, Danielle, as she will be graduating with her class at UMO on Saturday. Congratulations are also in order for Board member Ken Gardiner and staff member Sheryl Whittier, as they both have children graduation from college this weekend, too!

Dalene Dutton
Executive Director
Five Town Communities That Care
219 Meadow Street, P.O. Box 1135
Rockport, ME 04856

www.fivetownctc.org
dalene@fivetownctc.org Office: (207) 236-9800 Cell: (207) 322-9262