Melissa’s Journey into Prevention
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White from Vive 18 and today we’re hanging out with a new friend, Melissa Moore. She is the owner of M3 or cubed consulting LLC, depending on how you want to say it. She’s the owner and lead trainer there. She’s also a certified prevention specialist with over 25 years of experience in public health. And we got connected and I would just loved her story. I knew that she could offer some very valuable advice for everyone here on the show because she lives in your world day by day. And she has been for the last two, almost three decades.
So today stay tuned. We are going to cover some really, really awesome tips on funding and sustainability which I know is very, important today. So stick around, we’re gonna get to know Melissa and leave y’all with some valuable information to help your prevention cause. Melissa, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Happy to be here. Excited to be here. Yeah. Yeah. And you’re, you’re out in Wisconsin. Absolutely. I hear you haven’t lost your accent yet from being a part of Wisconsin for a while, no, I got it. I got it real good out here. Yeah.
Absolutely. So everybody that’s listening, don’t judge because this is part of the whole Midwest nice. That’s what you get here today.
Yup. You betcha that you’re going to get a full Wisconsin episode. I just visited for Christmas with the family and everything. And so the accent gets a little thicker when I’m up North. then as I feel like Arizona people say doesn’t have an accent, but there’s gotta be something out here, gotta be some, some, at least a phrase. You you said up north and I heard up north, but you know, it’s, it is what it is. That’s, that’s who, that’s we bring to the table for sure.
Absolutely. So Melissa, please tell us a little bit more about you, how you got involved in prevention and what your experience looked like. So my prevention story actually goes back further than I planned in my professional career. Back in junior high, I was actually tapped by a number of teachers that saw leadership potential in me and they said, you know, we want you be a part of this new AIDS teen peer group. And the group was supported through local public health. And there’s a number of us that went, we educated grades lower than us, we educated our peers, we went and talked at different you know, local, state, federal, like government opportunities. So I never really realized that’s what I wanted to do in life. actually, after high school, I went to school down in Milwaukee at Marquette for criminology. And I was planning on looking at forensic psychology. I just happened to get offered a job in tobacco prevention coming out of college.
And I started a public health, it was actually interesting. My mom, you know, worked in public health as their finance person. I knew everybody there because they knew me from way, way, way little. and I just never left. And here I am, you know, nearly 25 years later, love public health, love what I do love every single day be a different challenge. sometimes those challenges can be pretty tough. definitely sustainability is a perfect topic to talk about when we talk about, you know, coalition work and prevention. But my love for prevention is all around building those relationships and building those connections to make the community a healthier, safer place.
That’s incredible. I’m thinking of the, right now my mind goes to some of our partners that are from statewide agencies. And one of the phrases I’ve just been hearing a lot recently is thinking very far in the future we need to start attracting young talent to the field. People don’t know this is a career option and hearing stories like yours, Melissa, where you even had a experience in middle school, starting in middle school then, and went full circle and you spent right now so much time contributing to prevention and public health. It’s really cool that being in the space and all the experiences that you have have now gone full circle to you helping start and lead youth prevention initiatives, you helping advisors and the adults in coalition work and things like that.
So I think of the life cycle of someone who falls in love with our field and it just makes sense just get excited to do some of our state partnerships that we have to show people how do you get young people involved so that they can become a part of this life cycle. And it’s a really fun career opportunity.
You know, and I look at it as when we came back out of COVID and we started coming back together again, right? The first conference, the first statewide conference we had in Wisconsin, I just remember looking around and there was folks like myself that have been in it for a long time, right? That have been in it, you know, 10, 15 and more years. And then there was a number of people that when you were asked to raise your hand, how long have you been in prevention? It was less than a year. Some of them were less than a month.
And I think being in a position now that I can help mentor, that I can help support people grow their prevention strategy, because it’s not just about having enough grant money to go around. It’s really about what are the relationships that we have. And that’s really, you know, whether you’re working with youth, whether you’re building up our youth and working with them to use their own voice and advocate for themselves, or you’re working with our city county officials or our policymakers.
It really is about how do we build the infrastructure of prevention? And unfortunately, a lot of the times our funding is filling potholes. If you look at the road analogy, we love to fill those potholes, but to build that infrastructure, it does take time and it does take people and the right people in the right places. And that’s one of the things that I will turn blue advocating for is just really get people to understand that these are decade long problems working on. We are not going to see changes overnight.
We did get here overnight and it’s gonna take time to recover out of this to a point when our community is living their best life. Right? Yeah. It’s such an investment too, that if we look at, as you said, this is an age-old problem, it’s been happening. mean, shoot, drug and alcohol addiction has been happening since biblical times, right? Or like the first writings even before that is this is an issue and it’s a human experience issue that’s very complex, as you said. And I think it’s you said this phrase, you said, I’ll advocate until I’m blue in the face. I think that is such an admirable quality in our field is like, we are passionate about this. You have to be because you can’t get paid as much as the executive who’s getting people hooked on these substances. They have huge budgets, but we got to fight them somehow and we got to educate on the alternative. So we gotta have people who are ready to advocate till they’re blue in the face.
Absolutely. I love throwing out those little turns of phrases and just the way to look at things because we talk about addiction. We can’t expect people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they have no bootstraps to pull, right? We need to be able to give people the tools and resources that they need. It’s not only individuals looking for recovery or people supporting their loved ones. It’s both preventionists. mean, if we don’t have the tools that we need, it’s very hard to have that kind of baptism by fire being thrown into the deep end and just, okay, go and you should know what you should be doing. And I think that that one of the mistakes when it comes to, again, investment is that we need to look at what is it that we can do to really address these things on many different levels because we wanna connect with each other. It’s our human nature. It’s who we are. It’s what we wanna do.
But if we’re not able to have the tools to be able to do that in meaningful way, we’re just kind of caught spinning our wheels or that dog chasing its tail and wondering why it’s not getting any. Yeah. Melissa, I’d love to ask you to brag on yourself a little bit and the projects and teams you’ve been a part of, because we love examples and stories here on the podcast. And I’m curious with your tenure, what are some of the projects and accomplishments you’ve been able to like help lead, be a part of that could inspire others to shoot for the same thing? What kind of things are you proud of?
Building Relationships in Public Health
Well, like I said, I think a lot of it comes down to connections and the relationships that I’ve built over time. I always laugh because my former supervisor and I said it was kind of like the mafia, the I’m a Noah guy, trying to figure out the best way to kind of come around from that and look at different ways to say that. But it’s about those connections. And I just think back to when I first started in coalition work specifically, coming out of college, going back to my hometown knowing, you it was a home, it was your hometown, small hometown, 8,000 people, you know, it was part of, they knew your history, you knew theirs. And I just remember getting handed this list of coalitions, like coalition members.
It looked awesome. It was the who’s who, 12 sectors, stamp approval list, right? But when it came down to doing the work, it was, you know, five people in the room and three of them were staff because people weren’t invested in understanding not only their role, but what they could do in their own space. And I think that’s one of the things that over the years in my coalition work, like that really kind of struck home because it’s not, you we don’t know everyone, we don’t know everyone we need to know, but we all know someone who knows someone we need to know, right? And I think that in the amount of time, you know, in those last 24 and a half years now, that taking that space and creating that space has grown the work that I’ve done, not only in the coalitions I’ve helped support and the nonprofits that I’ve helped support, but then the initiatives that we get going.
Natural Born Activator here, as far as Strength Finders, if you’re familiar, I love to take ideas. I love to move them to action. And that’s something I take pride of. So whether it was identifying a substance, drug-free, need to do two substances.
Prescription drug abuse, huge issue, right? Back in the early 2010s when they reformulated OxyContin, the response I got was, well, this is great, but we need to talk about heroin. We started talking about heroin. This is great, but we need to talk about meth. We talked about meth and heroin and prescription drug abuse and now we have cocaine flooding into the community. It’s really an opportunity. know, where there’s a supply, there’s demand. And in that very example right there when it comes down to not knowing who we need to know, I actually did not know that our police chief brought in a local funder.
A local funders is probably one of those when we talk, I joke about the 12 sectors, I say it’s a trap, don’t get stuck in it. Our funders aren’t even part of that. We need to have relationships with them. And little did I know in these conversations is that our police chief brought in one of the major funders who called me two days before Christmas to say, Melissa, what would you do if I give you $20,000 to raise awareness around this issue. I said, first, well, Merry Christmas, Gary. I appreciate this opportunity. And I’m like, I would be delighted. So not only was it the money that came in, the interest and awareness, the investment from someone that has a strong reputation in the community, he also brought in one of the local marketing firms, a marketing firm that I would not otherwise have had connections with.
In that, that Marketing firm helped us create an awesome public awareness. I called it a public initiative. It wasn’t necessarily an awareness campaign. was really about imploring people to take action. We called it pushback against drug abuse, had great imagery, great momentum. It was two years of various, a lot of success around a lot of different substances. But in that relationship came future relationships, future partnering opportunities. He was on my board.
He, every dollar we spent, they donated to. He helped connect us to other community leaders in the community that we wouldn’t otherwise have connections with. And I think that, again, it’s that trickle effect of prevention that we don’t really know how long that effect’s going to have. Yeah.
Yeah, well, I want to pull a couple of things from what you said because I’m thinking like next steps of, hey, you had an incredible team. You had the 12 sectors represented, but then said there was something missing, right? You mentioned a funder, you mentioned someone in marketing, which I know is an incredible asset because if you had to pay for that out of pocket, your grant money is gone just like that.
And you, you need people to go run the program. So, when you said the word, like we found a funder came to us or we found a funder. What? Like that’s a term I’m not familiar with it. Funder just means somebody who gives you money, right? Was there a certain title of professional title that came with that person and how they found you or how you found them?
Advocacy and Community Engagement
And it was the relationships. We have a local community foundation that serves, there’s some that are multi-county and then there’s some that are singular county. There’s one that, program person isn’t the one that necessarily makes funding decisions, but she knows the person that does. She knows that if I was a person that was leading up a youth group and they were looking to do outreach within their school and they needed $250 to purchase swag or t-shirts or something, some sort of incentivefor kids to get involved. Even though there’s grant money over here to help support some of that youth initiative incentives aren’t allowed. So I was able to pair and we were able to work together to pair. Here’s this family foundation that wants to invest in prevention. And here’s this group that’s looking for a small amount of money. Let’s purge them together. It was the same thing with our, I always call them our animal groups, know, the Elks, the Lions.
I don’t even know from there, but the animal groups always comes out. They love youth. They love working with youth. They love supporting youth. And so many times I see coalitions fail in that they’re only looking for the federal grants. They’re only looking for state funding, a lot of work behind the reporting and the accessing it and who can access it. And we forget about the fact that, you know what, the local tire shop is wondering why nobody comes to them and asks for donations for oil changes for the next event for your parent night. Those are the things we forget. So when I say funders, I almost should say it as investors. The community’s invested in us. There are some that bring money with it, of course, but we never really know who people that we are connected to. It’s really about that social capital that we can build. Wow.
I’m going to rattle off some more. So you mentioned the, the Elks club, the lions club, rotary club, Kiwanis club. so inviting them into, into your mission. then I, I’ve learned through doing this work that right. The coalition, when you run a coalition, you might be in touch with this larger grant that got you started on this mission. So you’re aware of that funding source, just like you mentioned.
And so the coalitions look at the schools and think they have no money. And then the schools look at the coalitions and say, you have no money when you could be sharing. even your schools, they have title one funding. they have, that’s for, if you have 40 % or more of low income families in your community, they have access to this funding pool called title one. You have title four for school culture. So their access to this funding is on title one.
Oftentimes, like you mentioned, like, these people are on our board or they are invested. And so they can make those connections to say, Hey, here’s the idea. Here’s how we change the world. All right. Here’s where we’re going to get the funding to do it. and another inspiration from your story is the fact that some people, when they start their coalition, You don’t know what you don’t know. And so you quickly learn, I should have a job description. I should have a job subscription for being on the board. And then I should have a job description for being a volunteer. And it might change per sector, right?
So your education sector is going to do this, research this, talk to these people, invite these people and then your investors are donating, donating this, you know and make your own connecting you with others, having meetings. But if you don’t spell it out, people don’t really know what they’re getting into. And so therefore you can’t set the tone for what work looks like. They just show up and share their opinion, which is nice sometimes, but we want a community full of workers.
The Importance of Local Funding and Partnerships
Right. Well, and I think that that’s one thing that when we have big grants, what happens is we look at it kind of like a wheel. You know, the coalition as the center, our partners as our spokes, and there’s this issue that’s holding us all together. Right. And I think what really changed my life was when Dave Chevelle, Dave Chevelle works with Cradka, fantastic guy. When he said you need to look at, you need to flip that around. You need to put the issue in the middle, make it an issue centric.
Your partners are your spokes and your coalition is the wheel. That’s the thing that keeps you together. I am 100 % supportive of silos in only in only when there’s constant communication. There’s trust, know, speed happens at this change happens at the speed of trust. If we cannot all work together in the same direction, we all want to say for healthier community.
That is where the that’s where the money’s at, right? That’s what we want to do. And me as a staff person, I need to live in that hub. I need to know what the schools are doing, what law enforcement’s doing, what the DA is doing. I need to know what treatment’s doing. I need to know the trends that are happening. And sometimes that happens in that coalition space, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s just how do we get ourselves invited to the table? And when you talk about partners, kind of call like kind of that figured outside the box, but not your usual suspects, not being new partners, new partnerships that you need to have, ongoing partners, the people that have been around and been to provide that context to the things that you’ve done, the experience that they have. And then your temporary partners.
And a lot of the times that is your funding arms. That is your people that you’re asking to invest in whatever it is. Because what I found is, know, coalition is kind of a dirty word. If you say coalitions, an eye roll happens and people are like, God, another meeting, right? Another hour coming together, talking about the issues. It’s horrible. Yeah, it’s terrible. You know, we’re going to tackle this. And then everybody leaves. It feels good. It comes back the next month and it’s like, it’s on repeat. So how do we shake that up? How do we look at engaging people differently, engaging people in that meaningful way so that sustainability is a constant and not an afterthought? Because if we don’t have the relationships, that money is going to come and go.
And we need to be prepared for that. And how do we look at those layers of engagement? Is it that I need you right? I need your expertise right now. We’re doing an event. We’d love to hear you talk. Is it that I’d like you to be part of my board for a year term? Is it that, you know, I’m looking for some support on grant writing. Can you write a letter of support for me? That’s a very specific ask, but that is something that’s going to connect you to that person. Right. Yeah. A great story. DSC, lots of great funds come in, correct? We have money to be able to do outreach. I’ll never forget when I first started working that DFC grant, I went to my supervisor and I said, you know, I’m thinking about going out to Quick Trip, local gas station. It’s like our Hy-Vee or whatever, Buc-Ease, whatever it is. It’s this big conglomerate. My plan was to ask them ⁓ for water for this event. She was, don’t worry about it. We have grant funding to support that. And I’m like, it’s not about the water.
It’s about the relationship because at some point we had no water and no water, no relationship, no grant, and we needed that. So building that relationship now can pay dividends in the future. So it’s all about the water.
Ooh, that’s good. That’s such a good perspective shift. It’s not about the product that you could pay for at the grant. It’s about the relationship. Wow. And if you started, because the grant is designed to help you for a specific amount of time and then you become sustainable. So if you start with these practices, you are way more likely to actually become sustainable and not have to depend on the grant. that right, that’s the like two heads.
There’s like a really fun head of a grant and there’s the scary one. and I feel like the quicker you realize this is going to go away, the quicker you can start prioritizing those. and I love the way you say is it’s all relationships.
Absolutely. I can tell you that when I went to my board, and it’s a nonprofit board, a nonprofit that didn’t act like a nonprofit in my previous role, the only checks they wrote were for DARE graduation cakes, and their checkbook started with 19. That just goes to show how old this coalition was, okay, or this initiative. And I went to them one day, and every time we had a sustainability committee meeting, it kept me kicked down sustainability plan that we had to do for DFC because we picked it up in years six through ten and I’m like it kept getting pushed out we didn’t have enough time people had to leave and at one point I said this cannot be moved this is the only thing on the agenda I’ll all I stood up at the front I drew a circle on a big flip chart and you know so you picture your pie I said how much of this do you think pays for him this is what my colleagues at the time and how much of this do you think is grant?
So they were throwing out numbers like it was bingo, know 70 % 80 % and I’m like, this is how much is his 5 % If we do not this grant 95 % of all the things that we do and support is going away like oh Because it’s something that you think is gonna happen in the future so it’s not just about the programs and services that we offer. It’s about the relationships that we have. How are we going to support recruitment and retention and re-engagement of people that maybe had fallen off? But then also, what is the infrastructure? If we’re not built to your point, having job descriptions, having a transition plan, having it all up here does nobody any good if I’m incapacitated or unable to continue. So it is about all of those things. People, program, infrastructure, you know, and if we can’t leverage those things against each other, it doesn’t matter how much experience I have as a coalition leader, I’m one person and not everybody’s going to like me and I have to be okay with that.
Yeah. If it depends on you alone, you are going to, you are going to have to play all these hats and you can’t be a professional fundraiser and implementer and trainer and researcher and network. Like you, you gotta find these people if it’s going to be sustainable. And I want to pivot Melissa because you, you are a trainer, like you help coalitions grow and sustain and do their best work. And I know there’s a lot of facets to that.
But I specifically wanted to talk to you today about your program on friend raising or fundraising. As you so eloquently put it, I love that. But can we talk about it? If we left this episode today and we had to go start like, Hey, we’re going to move it to the top of the agenda. Like you said, this is what we’re talking about next week. How do we do this right? And how do we equip our teams to do it right? Like what would you. We’re going to be back to the company again recommend and give us tips for.
Friend Raising: The Key to Fundraising Success
Well, I definitely would start with, it really does start with a handshake, not a handout. If you can at all help it, meet that group, meet that person, make those connections. If you don’t have those connections, utilize the connections you have, map it out to be able to connect to them. Because it’s about not just interest or investment or caring about the issue, it’s really about what kind of influence that they can have. And you have the capabilities by building that relationship early. So instead of going to your local animal club, if you will, your civic group and saying, you know, we’re looking for money to support this, just go there and say, this is what we’re working on. This is what we’re seeing. Asking the question, what is it that you’re seeing? That really is probably one of the biggest, biggest tips that I can do is start with a handshake, not a handout and be really strategic in your outreach efforts and your recruitment efforts, pay attention to who you need to retain. If all of a sudden the people start falling off, how do you re-engage them? And we’ve all taken a lesson in this over the pandemic for sure. It’s where we get people back in not what was or what is, but what could be. And you really got to focus on that.
And that’s, that’s a leadership skill in itself is painting a vision that, makes people want to be a part of it. And I love what you, I’m to tie back what you said before is when you’re creating that wheel is the mission or the problem you’re solving is in the center. So that is a way to reengage people and say, Hey, this is still an issue. We could really use you. not, Hey, join my club, join my coalition. Like.
People don’t need more things to join, but we all have problems we want solved and we want to be a part of that change. So if you’re the vehicle to do that, you’re going to have a great time recruiting awesome talent and volunteers.
And just understanding, having people understand that they do play a role in this, but then also your understanding of, as a staff person, as a person supporting this effort, what it is that people are already doing, because you’ll find that there is duplication. You’ll find that when we look at resources. One example that is aside a little bit from substance use, I’m just going to share it, it’s a very recent one for me. We put together this fantastic Senior Resource Guide and it’s intended for our aging adults and in their caregivers to connect them to resources. And it was created, it was kind of a want-want, know, all text, no graphics, not very exciting. So it was brought to us, you know, through my role at the local health department, we were able to zhuzh it up, looks great, it lives online, we can update it regularly. When it came to printing it, I’m like, well, we do have these funds we can use. And it’s funny, because we had to find the funds, right?
And then once we found the funds and got it printed, I had probably four or five partners say, know, when this needs to be printed again at about a thousand dollars to print probably about 300 of them to distribute. I’ve got these funds. So we had enough funders just by bringing it to the table of, Hey, did you know that this is something that you can invest in? They’re like, yeah, that would be no problem. So it could be paid for for the next seven years and everybody would be delighted to be able to do so.
Unless people are kind of teased out what it is or trying to figure out how they interact with it, sometimes we kind of miss that opportunity and it gets so much more impactful on the issues we’re trying to address, but it does help build that credibility for your coalition too.
Yeah, that’s so good. And people, people talk with each other. I, so Melissa, I don’t know if I shared this with you on our first phone call, but when I started this whole mission in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, throwing sober parties and, there was demand, right? Students across the nation saying, Hey, we want this. This is going to be really cool. And so I had to raise money for our national tour and the goal was, $50,000 to get a trailer, travel around the nation, just build this movement and help students realize they can have fun without drinking and using drugs. So my wife taught me how to fundraise and she comes from like doing missions and being a campus ambassador for a ministry. So I was like, okay, cool. I did that. I got a mentor from the university who raises funds for the university. And then my work, talking out of the biggest things that I learned, that number one is like people are excited to at least know what you’re up to and be invited to be a part of the mission. If you don’t ask them, then you’re stealing an opportunity from them.
So like be relentless in asking for what you need and talking about it. No one gets bored of your stories. I promise you, your spouse might like that might happen, but Everyone else, they also probably think you’re adorable and you’re a hard worker. But everyone else is totally cool with it and you’re not being annoying. Like it really is great. And the second thing is when we would go out and we’d have these meetings, I would literally just have a little slide deck on an iPad or my phone and I would show them the things we’re doing, the problem, the solution, what’s working with our program and what’s not working that his dreams are great from the stuff that was done in the past and how we’re different. And then here’s the future that I envisioned and I invite them to be a part of it. And so I ask them for money, like we’d be at a Denny’s or some like place. And I realized if I fill my calendar with appointments consistently, the money is just going to happen. And at the end of that appointment, I just had to ask something like, hey, you know, even if they didn’t support us, is there anybody else who could benefit from what we’re doing.
And so it led to all these appointments. And so if you’re leading a coalition and that’s third party’s game that the hard part is getting out of the, have to do it mindset and into I’m building a wheel. I’m building a team and that can only be done when, like you said, you start having handshakes instead of handouts. You’re going to build those relationships and we hit our goal. did our national tour and it led to the next phase of our business. Side note, it was a total failure of a project, but it served its purpose and led to something really, really great and so I just, I’m such a fan of all the things that you’re saying. They align perfectly with my experience. so yeah, I’m really, really grateful for, for people who are coaching on this stuff, because it’s, if we don’t get good at this, we’re going to lose all of our momentum when the grant runs out.
And Iwould say this is that in addition to kind of that whole wheel analogy, I also love to ta n’t something that, the school got the grant, they have to fix it. Or like with coalitions, a lot of the times it was just like, we think this is a good idea. And then they look at whoever is funded by the grant. And it’s like, you guys know as a coalition, as a nonprofit, you can do more than what I’m doing in my grant. I’m here to support you.
And I look at it kind of like a bus analogy of sometimes you’re driving the bus, sometimes these are things that you are part of. This is getting permanent drop box locations set up in your community. This is helping to do getting Narcan trainings or Nalox boxes set up at jail entrances. This is you leading the charge and communicating around the issues. So sometimes we are driving.
Navigating Roles in Coalition Work
Sometimes we’re riding in the bus. Sometimes we kind of take a step back, right? And we kind of are there to support what’s happening. Whether it’s people’s passion projects, whether it’s organizational change in different businesses, we’re kind of stepping back and we’re in a supportive role. And sometimes we’re waving that bus goodbye. Whether it’s, as you put it, so eloquently, a complete failure. Whether it’s something that somebody else took over and is running with mean a great example is I loved bringing together our schools, are you serving orgs, are you know some of our representatives from the coalition and we did a school networking every single year. It always started with the facilitated conversation of what is it that you’re seeing, what are the trends you’re seeing, what are some of your greatest needs and we end up coming up with a plan of okay so where do we go from here. At one of those meetings it was every single school saying we need more counseling in schools, we need more support for our students.
We need more mental health services. in that, we provided the conduit for conversation at that meeting. Out of that meeting, a small group said, you know what, we see this as an issue too. Let’s take this over here into this parking lot. And then we were able to help support that conversation. So we went from driving the bus to riding in the bus. By the next year, this group created its own nonprofit. It created its own school counseling consortium. And they were able to take it from there.
I mean, those are the examples that I love to share is because it’s not about taking ownership forever. Sometimes that stuff needs to fly. Sometimes other people are equipped to take it forward and we don’t have to do everything by ourselves. And I think, you know, giving ourselves grace, taking care of ourselves, you know, managing that self care is going to help us be better and more effective because it’s those relationships.
High impact coalitions, Harvard Business Review actually wrote a great article around high impact coalitions and they do talk about it. Keeping your structures loose and your rules loose, keeping those relationships tight, like that is where it’s at. That is the way to continue to get people to participate. I said, that’s where front raising is just as important as fundraising. And if we can’t leverage that, we are going to, unfortunately, our efforts are going to suffer and we’re going to fail.
Dang. I’ve learned so much from this, Melissa. Thank you for being on the show with everybody. want to leave people with a way to get in touch with you because you have things that I think everyone that listens to this podcast could really benefit from. So where can we go to learn more about your work and how to partner up to like to help us and our organization?
So I can tell you that one of the things that I absolutely love doing and the way that I communicate and keep people connected and engaged whether I’m not, I don’t see everybody every day, right? It is through a newsletter that I send out, it’s called The Activator. It is tips, tricks, trends, things that you’re seeing in the local, in the headlines, local, national headlines and it’s really a way to stay connected. So that would definitely be one way. People can always reach out to me and find a time to, I love to chit chat around these issues. I love to travel and support different coalitions and initiatives and communities. I love being a mentor to folks and the probably the best way or easiest way to reach me is m3-consultingllc.com.
You can connect with me on my website. You can find me on Facebook. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m part of the CADCA forum for those CADCA folks out there. And then also anybody can email me anytime. It’s just info at m3-consultingllc.com or give me a call 715-216-0721. And I would be delighted to find a time to sit down and figure out what kind of goals I can help you reach.
That’s incredible. All right, y’all, this has been an awesome episode. And I just want to congratulate you. You made it into 2026. We’re going strong. You’re in the game or maybe just entered. And I just want to say thank you for doing the life-saving work that you do. Please tap Melissa’s shoulder for anything that you need help with. And of course, at Vive 18, getting young people involved and excited about prevention. We’re here for you.
Gotta plug the cruise. The prevention cruise set sail from Boston to Bermuda in April. And yes, there are a few spots left. We can’t guarantee the same group rate because it’s getting closer, but we’ve got a couple of spots if you wanna claim them. And y’all, this is such good to be, it’s so good to be on this journey with you. We’ll see you next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.
