Meridian Mayor’s Anti-Drug Coalition selected for national leadership institute
The following is a news release via the Idaho Office of Drug Policy:
The Office of Drug Policy and the Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections are pleased to announce the selection of Meridian’s Mayor’s Anti-Drug Coalition (MADC) for participation in the 2011 Underage Drinking Enforcement Training Center’s Institute for Collaborative Leadership sponsored by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Elisha Figueroa and Lieutenant John Overton of the Meridian Police Department are among the few selected to participate in the training from among applicants across the country. They were chosen through a competitive process based on their demonstration of readiness and vision to develop comprehensive community-based strategies that combine enforcement, community environmental prevention and media strategies for reducing youth risk behaviors involving alcohol.
The Institute focuses on assisting community leaders with strategic assessment, problem definition, goal setting and action planning that combine evidence-based environmental and enforcement strategies. It also emphasizes the development of leadership process skills, communication skills and innovative thinking paradigms needed for leaders to empower broad-based strategic community engagement. Strong leadership capacity is needed to address the challenges of engaging youth, parents and other adults in supporting underage drinking laws; sustaining a communication infrastructure between law enforcement and prevention initiatives, and addressing the community needs for creating the healthy and safe environments required for optimal youth development. The Institute is a year-long program of in-person and on-line training, guided implementation in the field, conference participation and presentations, and formative evaluation.
Idaho’s Enforcing Underage Drinking Laws partnership provides grants to local communities and organizations to support efforts to reduce underage drinking. Youth who begin using alcohol before age 15 are four times more likely to have alcohol dependency problems as adults. Alcohol is 7.5 times more likely to kill a young person than all other illegal drugs combined.
