Washougal High students attend national anti-drug abuse training

Unite! Washougal received state grant to send local students to Chicago event

By Doug Flanagan
August 29, 2024 1:33 pm
Latest News, Life, News, Schools, Washougal

Unite! Washougal Community Coalition staff, volunteers and students gather during the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America’s Mid-Year Training Institute in Chicago in July 2024. (Contributed photo courtesy of Margaret McCarthy)

Members of the Unite! Washougal Community Coalition’s Ambassadors program have learned that knowledge is power when it comes to preventing young people from misusing or abusing drugs or alcohol.

“We have to obtain the knowledge, because if we don’t know what (information) we’re spreading, then how’s it actually going to stick?” Washougal High School student Hunter Hardin said during a Unite! Washougal meeting held Aug. 22. “We obtain the knowledge from going to events to learn about how (substance abuse) is bad, why it’s bad, what it does to you, what it does to your friends, what it does to your social groups, and how it will affect your life overall. Then we can spread the word. But the most important part is knowing why it’s bad.”

Hardin and four other Washougal High students increased their knowledge about youth substance-abuse prevention during the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America’s (CADCA) 23rd annual Mid-Year Training Institute (MYTI), held July 14-18 in Chicago.

According to CADCA, the event offers in-depth, interactive training sessions geared specifically for community coalitions such as Unite! Washougal, a Washougal-based nonprofit that supports youth, encourages families, enriches community and guides healthy choices.

“(The MYTI) is all about empowering coalitions to come back (home) and do the work better,” said Unite! Washougal Director Margaret McCarthy. “It’s pretty intense. There’s a long list of all the different trainings you can go to. It was an eye-opening experience for them. To see that other kids are working on (the same things they are), I think that’s super empowering. They learned from other perspectives.”

Unite! Washougal received a grant from the Washington State Department of Health’s Commercial Tobacco Prevention Program to fund the trip.

“Unite! Washougal was chosen to mentor a coalition from north Mason County (Washington) in building coalition capacity and youth engagement,” McCarthy said. “As part of that program, Unite! was able to bring along some of the youth to model and learn alongside the north Mason County team to help them learn leadership, community service, and substance-misuse prevention.”

CADCA, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization, represents more than 5,000 community coalitions that include school staff, law enforcement, youth, parents, healthcare, media members and tribal communities. It has members in every U.S. state and also operates internationally.

“We learned lessons about how to include people, and how to make people feel more welcome, and how that can help with preventing addiction,” Hardin said. “It just shows that there are multiple ways to solve the problem rather than just your way.”

Hardin, Joselyn Guajardo, Olivia Alvarez, Angel Garibay-Villa and Eduardo Gonzalez-Campos represented Washougal at the MYTI. All five students are members of Unite! Washougal’s Ambassadors program, which pairs Washougal High upperclassmen with freshmen and new students for peer mentoring and support.

“They were chosen to attend because of the leadership that they have demonstrated in their school and community, and their desire to build skills and use them to help others,” McCarthy said.

Alvarez, Guajardo and Hardin delivered a presentation about the Ambassadors’ “Breathe Easy” campaign during the MYTI training event. The Washougal students also learned about substance-abuse prevention and coalition work and about how to develop a community assessment and intervention plan.

“I think that (the experience was) very useful, and something that I’m going to continue to take with me,” Guajardo said. “We got little notebooks (filled with) activities, and I still have mine. I look back on the notes, and I’m like, ‘OK, this is what I need to do. This is how long I have to do it. I can do it. I know people are going to help me out.’ We came back with a lot of ideas that we now get to put into our own community.”

Alvarez said the training helped her contextualize the Ambassadors’ activities, such as their recent efforts to catalog youth access and exposure to alcohol, tobacco and vaping products at local retailers.

“I liked getting to see where the problems are and how we can solve them. It’s more (about) seeing how we can fix things,” said Alvarez, who attended the 2023 MYTI in Dallas.

Garibay-Villa and Gonzalez-Campos attend training sessions on fundraising; utilizing data to plan effective prevention activities; practical leadership; building capacity to achieve community-level change; and addressing prevention strategies to the opioid epidemic.

“(The training sessions) helped us a lot with our bonding,” Guajardo said. “As a whole, (the conference) was very informative. We got to learn a lot of things about a lot of different people, and hear other people’s experiences in different states and how their communities are (doing).”

The students said they are considering raising money to fund future “healthy youth” events, and are working to create and distribute kits to their peers that help people quit vaping.

The Unite! Washougal Ambassadors program launched its Breathe Easy campaign during the 2023-24 school year “to reinforce “positive community norms,” which help reduce “inaccurate beliefs” in communities and motivation to “use substances in order to fit in,” Garibay-Villa said during a Washougal City Council meeting held April 22.

“We went to (local) elementary schools and gave presentations about how to use resources, how to stay healthy, and things like that, and also spread (the word about) our campaign,” Guajardo said during the Aug. 22 Unite! Washougal meeting.

“I remember that after we did our presentation at city council, one of the women said that her child came home with the bag that we gave out, and I think that’s something that’s always going to stick with me because it’s really cool that we were able to spread a message (and that students) went home and shared it (with their families). I want to continue to spread that message, maybe go to the middle schools, talk more to the high-schoolers, things like that.”

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