1. Information Dissemination

• Participation in community health fairs and other events such as the Mars Hill College Health Fair to disseminate underage drinking and drinking amounts information.
• Newspaper articles
• Media
• Attend local county family related events to disseminate programmatic and risk/protective factor information to parents and children.
• Complete SYNAR related activities, which is an initiative focused on reducing underage drinking and tobacco sales. We work with local coalition groups to bring awareness of this issue to community members, stakeholders and merchants.
• Create and present culturally relevant presentations to inform Hispanic communities about youth and family substance use/abuse and what influences these issues. Cultural factors that increase the risk of these behaviors and protective factors that can be strengthened to prevent these behaviors are presented.
• Create websites to work alongside local groups such as the Henderson County Family Violence Task Force to disseminate information on what these organizations and groups do in the community to provide services.
• Attend Mental Health Forums to disseminate agency prevention and treatment services to communities.

2. Alternatives

• School summer programs such as the Polk County Schools 21st Century Community Learning Centers After School Program, Builder's Club, and six week Summer Enrichment Camp for students who are currently in kindergarten through fifth grades.
• Members of groups and coalitions that help engage youth in discussions regarding local alternative programs or activities that exist or can be created with their input.

3. Problem identification and referral

• Prevention Services uses the GAIN Short Screener (http://www.chestnut.org/LI/gain/GAIN_SS/index.html) as a basis for referral to our treatment programs and to other community based services. We have a directory of local, regional and national resources and have referral partnerships with local agencies, including school systems who refer to our community programs or to internal programs supported by ARP/Phoenix. Also we support integrated care initiatives such as the Community Health Center in Polk County.
• Provide resource and referral information to attendees of presentations at the end of sessions.
• Provide available Spanish speaking resources and referrals to parents who attend parenting classes at Sacred Heart for local resources based on disclosed needs.
• Attend Eckerd Camp screening and referral monthly meetings to integrate concepts such as prevention parenting programs for family members.

4. Community-based processes

• Work to solve community problems and wellness development by participating and catalyzing community coalition work that is either focused on prevention or is concerned with the whole continuum of care. We are piloting the use of Theory of Change (http://www.theoryofchange.org/background/basics.html) as a methodology to map the details of project (e.g. mental health/substance abuse community collaborative initiatives) causal pathways.
• Social determinants of health (http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/) are a context of our community work and associated interests include poverty and the probable syndemic (http://www.cdc.gov/syndemics/definition.htm) relationship with violence and substance use.
• We are interested in forming alliances to do community based research (http://depts.washington.edu/ccph/) in such areas as social network analysis (http://www.aecf.org/KnowledgeCenter/Publications.aspx?pubguid=%7BB784B034-A872-4F23-889B-0B8B5C19DA84%7D) to help us understand individual and family social capital and community cohesion in relation to factors of community inequality.
• We are a member of the Latino Health Promotion Partnership which began in July 2007 when a group of women representing ARP/Phoenix Prevention Services, Buncombe County Medical Society, the YWCA and the University of North Carolina-Asheville decided to address the lack of healthcare, prevention and treatment of substance abuse and mental illness within Buncombe County’s Latino community.
• Link up community agencies when shared interests are noted for further collaboration.
• We are a member of the Anti-bully Task Force meetings in Transylvania County to address violence issues in school system.
• Provide support and are actively engaged in helping Transylvania County’s Child & Family Coalition Commission continue strategic planning process with Theory of Change.

5. Environmental approaches

• We are working with coalitions that promote community and State policy change including tobacco use (Project Assist http://www.healthybuncombe.org/healthycommunity/restaurants/whatisorojectassist.htm).
• We are working on a strategy for a social norms (http://www.socialnorm.org/) campaign that will focus on underage drinking.
• Some of our social norms work is also about helping human service professionals develop new ways of approaching social problem solving. For example we are developing understanding of Syndemics and Systems Dynamics (http://www.systemdynamics.org/) which, for most community members, suggest new mental models for planning, effectiveness and evaluation. Futures Studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foresight_(futures_studies)), orienting people to possible and preferable futures instead of probable futures, and even ideas of wellness (http://definitionofwellness.com/) (more than being disease free) and asset development (http://www.search-institute.org/) (compared with risk reduction) rather than a disease model of public health, are fairly new to human services.