AMES, Iowa – One 120 community leaders from 30 Iowa counties – including mayors, legislative staffers, health agency leaders, and court administrators – attended the “Planning as such against Opioids within your Community” workshop,? on Wednesday, September 12, from 9:30 a.m.-4 p.m. with the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center in Ames.
Participants were designed with community toolkits to enable them to in reaching various years with substance misuse prevention programming.?
The workshop was hosted through the Iowa State University PROSPER Rx project and backed up by a Rural Protection Education grant in the USDA’s National Institute on Food and Agriculture and also Midwest Counterdrug Training Center.
“PROSPER” refers to “PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to further improve Resilience,” an evidence-based prevention model developed at Iowa Report that has been shown to lower rates of substance misuse C including misuse of prescription opioids C among rural youth and teenagers.
The PROSPER delivery system links the USDA Extension and Outreach System with public schools and community-based teams to impact risk and protective factors known to influence drug and alcohol abuse.
Building capability to combat and prevent opioid misuse is usually an aim of the PROSPER Rx project at Iowa State, directed by Lisa Schainker, a scientist in the Partnerships in Prevention Science Institute in the College of Human Sciences at Iowa State. The work helps community partners build networks – and will provide coaching support to extend the capability of Extension and Outreach professionals to produce and gaze after community prevention systems to combat the opioid epidemic.
