Promoting Healthy Communities

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention defines a healthy community as: A community that is continuously creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources that enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and in developing to their maximum potential.

With that in mind, The Partnership works closely with community stakeholders to help support environments that foster positive youth development and increase resources for effective prevention strategies. This is called Environmental Management. The core of Environmental Management is that communities must address conditions in which young people live, learn, and grow to ensure their health and well-being. These conditions include structural, policy, practice, social, and/or cultural factors that may lead to substance misuse. Specific examples of Environmental Management strategies include sustained community partnerships and resource sharing, policy review and revision, communications and marketing, community education, and policy enforcement. Young people thrive in healthy communities and report feeling connected and like they belong, as well as having strong, positive relationships with adults in their community.

The Partnership has community-based prevention initiatives such as increasing connections with adults through Community Mentoring Hubs and increasing the capacity of parents and caregivers to talk to their kids about substance misuse via Por Los Ninos.