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What are the Seven Strategies for Community Change?
CADCA (Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America) provides all Coalitions with a guide to strategize our substance misuse prevention efforts. This guide is called the "Seven Strategies for Community Change". (See this fact sheet for a helpful visual.)
The seven strategies are the following:
1. Provide information: Educating community members on prevention topics through one-way information sharing, for example, articles, newsletters, brochures, social media, advertisements, presentations, and campaigns.
2. Build skills: Exchanging two-way information with the community with the goal of developing various abilities. Examples include workshops, Q & A discussions, and trainings.
3. Provide support: Utilizing Coalition resources to support local partners, schools, youth activities, and parents by providing funding, transportation, equipment, and training.
4. Change barriers/access: Focusing on increasing barriers and decreasing youth access to substances by providing alcohol vendor training, increasing law enforcement, and supporting school drug policy changes.
5. Change consequences/incentives: Providing positive incentives for healthy behaviors and negative consequences for unhealthy behaviors. Examples include lower insurance costs for alcohol vendors who participate in trainings and increasing citations for violations.
6. Alter physical design of environment: Changing the environment to alter behavior, such as increasing prevention signage, decreasing alcohol signage near schools, adding more lighting in parks, etc.
7. Change policies, rules, practices, and procedures: Participating in advocacy in local, state, and federal government to change policies such as social host liability, school drug policies, alcohol permits, funding for family services, and more. |
