Trevon Norman is a Certified Prevention Specialist and Coalition Coordinator from Wichita Falls, Texas. In this episode, he shares his journey from youth ministry and childcare into prevention and reveals powerful strategies for creating champions in your coalition. Discover how authentic relationships, servant leadership, and strategic recognition build unstoppable teams that drive lasting community impact.
Key Takeaways
- Lead with genuine passion people invest in authentic leaders
- Give others opportunities to contribute their time, talents, and resources
- Recognize people for their individual strengths, not just their roles or organizations
- Build trust by showing up, staying connected, and investing in relationships
- Empower youth and community members with ownership to create lasting engagement
Introduction and Celebrations
Jake: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White. And today we are hanging out with a new friend, Trayvon Norman, who is a certified prevention specialist from Texas doing coalition work. We actually met when we were doing some work at the APPM, the Texas Prevention Providers meeting, and just hit it off right away. Trayvon, thanks, man.
Trayvon: Man, it’s a blast to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. We connected quickly through a mutual friend of ours. I’m just excited to be in the room. You know, the cliche is get in rooms where people are better and smarter than you. So I’m good.
Jake: That’s nice of you to say. And speaking of, Mitchell Moore was the guy who introduced us. That guy is a wealth of knowledge and so excited about our field. Shout out to Mitchell Moore, everybody, Prevention Training Services.
Trayvon: Yes. Shout out Mitch. I feel like I have to be a walking notepad anytime I’m around him. I want to stop him and say, hey, repeat that and write it down. Try to stick it in my brain. Hopefully I don’t forget it.
Jake: Absolutely. So Trayvon, please tell us about you first and then I want to hear all about how you got into prevention work.
Trevon’s Journey into Prevention
Trayvon: Man, about me, let’s see. First thing I can tell you is I’m a military brat. My dad served 20 years, and so people always ask if I’m gonna join because typically it just runs in the family. But I always tell people, look, I serve my twenty with my dad. And I’m done. I had no desire.
Jake: Where did the brat come in?
Trayvon: It’s just a phrase military brat, military kid. It’s just a term to show you’re a military child of a current or former military member. We bounced around. Most of my memories are from when we were in South Dakota, then we were in Japan for a little bit. And then once we left Japan, we came to where I am now, Wichita Falls, Texas. That is North Texas. When I tell people I’m from Wichita Falls, they go, Kansas. I’m like, no, no, no. There’s a Wichita Falls, Texas.
Jake: You’re like, I know where I live.
Trayvon: Exactly. When I was in high school, a lady tried to correct me. I’m like, no, I know what I’m talking about. There’s a Wichita Falls, Texas.
We got here in Wichita Falls in ’94, so I was starting sixth grade. From sixth grade through my college years was here. So I always tell people, if they ask if I’m from here, I always say yes and no. Was I born here? No. But I’ve grown up and matured and lived here. My family knows nothing else except when we go back home, which is Pennsylvania. I was born in Pittsburgh, in the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We go back to visit. So yes, Steelers. I’m loud and proud. We’re in Texas. Everything’s bigger in Texas. You gotta say it with your chest.
From there, I’ve always been a people person. I study people. Sociology is my lane. I can be home. I’m a homebody. My wife and I, we’re staycationers. We’ll take off work and just stay at home.
Jake: I love that, man.
Trayvon: We do that probably too much, but we got the time, so why not use it?
Jake: One of my favorite memories was when we were gonna go international for the first time an anniversary with Emily and I but we couldn’t fly. So we ended up doing a staycation. With all the budget we saved, we went all out. We went jet skiing, rode those jet boots that shoot you out of the water. We went on a shopping spree, treated ourselves. I became a fan of staycations at that moment.
Trayvon: My wife and I just celebrated eleven years together in January. We have two beautiful children a seven-year-old daughter, the light of my life. And then we have our little one we call Bam Bam, Buddy Man. His name is Evander, and he will be turning two July thirteenth. I love people watching. I’m a people person, but I always knew I was gonna work with people in some capacity. I had the privilege of serving as a student pastor at my local church here for eight years and now I pastor with my wife in a neighboring town in the county of a little small congregation of about twenty-five people. But it is thriving and growing.
Youth Ministry to Prevention Work
Jake: That’s cool. I don’t know if we talked about this, but I spent a couple of years as a youth pastor during COVID. It’s such a good ground to not only make an impact, but the skills that I learned in prevention—you’re just around students for such a great period of time. There’s a great way to be vulnerable. I feel like God opens doors, opens hearts, and you really get to know what these students are going through. And then when you do prevention, you’re very much in touch with students’ lives and challenges they’re facing.
Trayvon: What you say is absolutely true. Here’s the crazy thing, Jake—when I started prevention work, I’m like, these are all biblical concepts. What in the world? I’ve been in that lane. I’ve been in prevention my whole life, basically. And that vulnerability goes right along with it.
Jake: It’s really cool to see because it’s kind of like this water bottle. I can slap a Vive 18 logo on it and it’s a Vive 18 water bottle, but it’s always been this life-saving water bottle. And that’s exactly how I view our faith. Jesus is fighting the battle. He is prevention, he is saving people in recovery and from addiction. I’ve never seen miracles happen like I have in that presence. And so it’s nice to see in our field that they acknowledge it’s an incredible protective factor and it’s a segment that needs to be partnered in this work. Whether you believe or not, it should be part of the discussion.
Trayvon: Such a strong protective factor. It goes hand in hand.
Building Authentic Relationships
Jake: But Trayvon, I want to ask you about your coalition work now. If you can share the story of how you got into it, and then I wanna hear all about your work that you’re doing, what you’re proud of.
Trayvon: Sure. So long story short, I spent 12 years in childcare. I ran school age programs, before and after programs. Then I helped run a childcare for a short time. When that time was running out, there was a former coworker who had started working for the company I work for now. She found out my tenure was about to end in childcare. She’s like, “You, this is perfect for you, what we do over here.” I said, okay. So I came and checked it out and got hired as a prevention specialist. The first eight years of my prevention career was spent doing that. I was in classrooms teaching curriculum to indicated populations, doing PTD—Project Tornos Drugs. I did that for eight years, got really comfortable with it. It’s like, my goodness, this is right up my alley. This is right in my lane. Because I reference student pastoring—I’m basically doing the same thing in a classroom, cultivating those relationships with the youth. It was great. I grew there, made a ton of connections in several different little pocket communities because Wichita County has little pocket communities within it.
Making all those connections, Jake, I had no idea why I was even making this connection, but it was happening. Well, 2024, if we fast forward my boss lets me know we’re writing for this grant to get a CCP, a Community Coalition Partnership. We got it. And she’s like, “I want you to apply to be the coordinator.” So I applied. There it is. The shift is simple. When you’re in youth prevention, you do some environmental stuff here and there, but you’re mainly focusing on the individual. With coalition, you can still do those things more in a presentation capacity. You go to the school, do assemblies and all kinds of great stuff there. But then you get youth involved to help you on the coalition to do that. Once I was blessed with that position, all those connections I’d made, I was wondering why I made them. There it was. We gotta build a coalition with people interested in grabbing those youth and grabbing those adults and coming together. We’re still in our baby stages because it’s 2026. We’re just two years in. But in those two years, we’ve been able to make some good headway.
Servant Leadership and Trust
Jake: Tell me about those. If you had to have a brag sheet, what would you put on it? What are you proud of?
Trayvon: So first thing I put on my brag sheet is when we had youth come in and help us with one of our first campaigns the coalition was doing. It’s just a simple awareness campaign. They helped us develop the graphics to put on billboards and in our newsletters for the community to know the issues going on within our youth and adults. The youth have the brainchild of all that social media stuff, so we let them go to work while the adult coalition was under the surface working towards environmental changes. We’re working on a data sheet, a data graphic to get to all of our stakeholders. Once we got that done, we were able to get it to all of our interest groups and people directly or semi-directly involved in the coalition to raise awareness. We had it going on both ends on the social media end and on the personal end where people could have it in their hands.
That campaign of just that awareness, I’m very proud of that because a lot of people don’t have the ability to get local data. That partnership we already had with the youth prevention side because they developed questionnaires we took all of that and made a data graphic so that all of the things we’re trying to attack, like reinforce protective factors or reduce risk factors, is there on paper. People see, my goodness, this is an issue.
“I love creating or cultivating champions.”
Empowering Others in Coalitions
Jake: Bro, when we were in the room and you and I met each other, it was just point blank—hey, you need to be on the podcast. What lights you up to talk about? He said, creating champions. I’ve been waiting for this. What’s one of your champions that you want to shout out? Who helps you quite a bit? And then take us to school—how you think we can be good at this?
Trayvon: So I wanna shout out two, if that’s okay. First, his name is Ryan Lynn. He actually works for the Family Initiative, which helps foster parents and kids and deals with troubled youth. He actually worked at an alternative education center where I was doing curriculum. When he left and got into his new stuff, he was like, “Let me tell you what I’m gonna be doing. So get with me.” I was like, sure. But when the coalition fired up, he was one of my first people I called. He’s like, “Whatever you need, I’m there because I know the passion you have and I know what you do.”
Tip number one for anybody wanting to cultivate champions: you’ve got to show that passion. If they see you’re genuine and real and passionate, it doesn’t matter. They’re all in. Even if the information’s tough to hear. When they see the passion and drive and authenticity, all the other stuff missions and vision statements aligning it can or it can’t. Because I’ll tell you, we got people whose mission statements might not align with ours, but they’re still all in because they’re given the opportunity to invest.
Jake: And it makes so much sense to say it, but I think sometimes what gets in the way of passion is there’s this voice in our heads that says, “Well, do they really care? Am I too much? Am I bothering them?” Like all these things that go through my mind. I’ve battled with this building a prevention brand. The story I remember the most is when I was in college, I took a geology class which I had no interest in. I was so bad at most math and science classes, so I was dreading the outcome. I remember this professor was so passionate about rocks. He made me care just because he loved it so much. I ended up passing the class because when he opened his office hours, I just went to hang out with him and talk about it, even a subject I cared nothing about.
Trayvon: I would wager that professor’s passion drew you in so much that you’re like, bro, I gotta pass this class so I don’t fail him.
Trayvon: He drew you in so much that now you care. You care that he cares, you know?
Jake: That could absolutely have been part of my feelings then. And that’s what you do when you’re in the field working with young people. It’s like, yes, the thought’s gonna come into your head of well, they don’t care, they gotta be here. But you get passionate about it. You show it. It does work. So I echo what you said and there’s proof.
Trayvon: My second person I’ll shout out her name is Sherry Booker. She was very hesitant. She was one of the ones who came on the coalition like, “Yeah, I heard about this, it may be something,” but she was very hesitant. The thing that got her was and here’s tip number two: if you give people the opportunity to invest.
We know investment happens in different ways. People can invest their time, their talent, and their treasure. There are some folks who will just cut the check and be like, “We’re with you.” But then there’s those other people who will give you their time, they’ll be there. And then there’s those others who will give you their talent. That’s the thing. I would reach out to people or speak to them in meetings, but not their company or sector them. Like Sherry, I see that you are such a great organizer. Would you be interested in being on our executive committee? Because we got a spot open and we need someone to help pull this all together. I see that you have all these organization skills. It’s you, not your job title. It’s you.
And so if you can give people the opportunity to invest in what you see in them and it takes some work on your end because you gotta be able to spot that if you built that culture at the beginning, you’ll be able to see it quickly. When you give people the opportunity to invest, those levels of involvement they have escalate. They’ll go from just networking where they’ll share your stuff all the way to collaboration where they’re like, “Don’t you do anything without me. If you go do something, you email, call me.”
And at this point this is the end game they do your advertising for you. They shout you out. They’re the ones throwing you out there. Even if they can’t be there, I’ve got people who if they can’t be at a meeting, they send a representative.
Jake: Wow, that’s cool. That’s such a great way to expose new people to the mission. It’s like, hey, I can’t make it, but I love this thing. You gotta go for me.
Trayvon: It works both ways on the youth end and the adult end. With youth, it’s the same thing. You call it ownership. You give them ownership of it. If they say, this is mine, then they care so much more.
“When you give people the opportunity to invest, they move from networking to cooperating to coordinating, all the way to collaborating.”
Creating Community Impact
Jake: And that’s one of the biggest complaints of people trying to start a youth program or doing everything themselves—the students don’t have ownership. But if you begin with the expectation that it’s theirs, you allow them to own it and grow it, then you don’t battle that. You’re not overworked anymore. The students are doing it. But you hit it on the head. You talked about the passion you have. Give them the opportunity to invest their time, treasures, talents. And then you said this with Sherry’s example—you’re speaking to them, not their club, not their company, not their rotary. It’s like, I see you. And I don’t know if you noticed, but you said, “You’re really good at this,” or “I’ve noticed you excel at this. We could really use you.” It is so good to be needed. Think about all the people that want this purpose and to do something with their time, treasure, and talent that they don’t have something worthwhile. People need this.
Trayvon: It’s fascinating to see and the doors that just open up or the people that they’re connected to. Before I hopped on here with you, we were just at a groundbreaking for one of our local Boys and Girls Clubs here. I knew most of the people there, but I was able to make a connection I hadn’t before. What happened was the person said, “Have you met Trayvon? Y’all need to get together.” Just them saying that, the other person was like, “Well, we gotta make it happen now cause the boss says.” So it keeps you busy, but it’s such rewarding work.
Recognizing Individual Strengths
Jake: Is there anything that you would recommend when you’re speaking to them? You had given us a perfect example of how you invited Sherry. Ryan put himself available to you. Are there any other ways that people have come into your organization as champions?
Trayvon: Sure. “Where can I be of service?” I have the privilege and honor of being able to serve on some other committees and do some work on other coalitions. Putting myself in those rooms and being like, they’re like, okay, who are you? I say who I am, and we just—what can I do for you? How can we help? That’s brought people. Just if you make yourself available as well, folks will be drawn to what they know is real. It’s not about perfection. I used to tell my students this when I was student pastoring: it’s not about perfection, but it is about persistence. You don’t have to be perfect, but you do gotta try. People can tell if you’re trying. So you keep trying and you do all the little things. We have social media, email blasts and all of that. But one of the things I asked my boss I was like, you know, we have a travel budget. Can I do personal visits? Because I just know how people appreciate that.
And if you’re expecting people to invest, then you’ve got to do some investing yourself. Some folks, when you take them to coffee, lunch, a smoothie it could be five dollars from the value menu. But if you bought it for me, I’m like, man, you’re in my corner. I like you. This is great. You get that face time. I’m thinking of our youth group kids. We’ll go through a year’s worth of programming and be like, “Hey, what was your favorite?” And it’s when Jake took me to this one rundown Mexican restaurant and we had chips and salsa and horchata. I was like, “That was it? That was your favorite?” Like, yeah, cause they felt special. Adults are the same way.
I get folks where we’ve never been in a meeting, but they’re all in. Because we stay connected, I send emails out logistics, minutes, agenda, all of that good stuff. But I also send them emails or give them a call just to check in on them. I’ve got folks out where we’ve never been in a meeting, but if I was to say, “Hey, we’re needing this to be sponsored,” it’s done. They’re the first ones to be like, “Yeah, we got it. Don’t worry about it.”
Jake: Well, and that’s a good reminder that what we do for the organization is not the same expectation we have for everybody else. You can’t expect everybody to go as hard as we do for the organizational mission. But you have the person who’s really great at making money, they’re really busy, they love to get a little text saying, “Hey, we need this for this project. Can you help out?” And they love sending the check. Even if you never see them and they just get thank you cards and feel appreciated. There’s different expectations, but you have that connection with them though. You know that relationship, which is big.
Trayvon: It’s important. Anybody who can take different relationship trainings, communication, all of those basics do it because it’ll pay off in the end.
Youth Engagement and Ownership
Jake: Before we close this out, do we have any last minute tips for creating champions?
Trayvon: No, we covered it. We got it. Just when you do that, when you give them the opportunity to invest, they will move up that involvement ladder. They’ll go from networking to cooperating to coordinating, all the way to collaborating.
Building Lasting Change
Jake: That’s incredible. Well, Trayvon, if people want to get in touch with you and follow your work, where can they find you?
Trayvon: You can find me at our website www.serenitytexas.com. You’ll click on the prevention tab and our coalition, Prevention Alliance for Wichita is there. If you want to see our fact sheet, our data, some of the work we’ve been doing, some of the artwork that the kids have done in some of those graphics—it’s all there. If you want to connect with me on email, it’s trayvon at Serenity Texas dot com. And I’ve got my little side hustle, my consulting. TN Consulting Services dot com.
Jake: Say that one more time. What’s the URL?
Trayvon: TN Consulting Services dot com.
Jake: Awesome. So if you all wanna have a conversation about this, get some guidance, go check out that page. Check out all the great work they’re doing over in Wichita Falls, Texas.
Trayvon: Wichita Falls. The first falls. We have a city closer to San Antonio called Marble Falls. So we always argue over who’s the other. We say we’re the first, they’re the other. We’re not the other falls, we’re the first falls.
Jake: That’s right. I’m not the other Jake in the room. You’re not the other Trayvon. That’s right. Thank you so much for being on this. I just enjoyed talking with you, man. This was super good.
Trayvon: It was a pleasure and honor. Bucket list. We can check it off.
Jake: Yeah, let’s go. And listen, for everybody that tunes in to the Drug Prevention Power Hour, I want to thank you for being in the field. I’m gonna recap because I learned so much today from you, Trayvon. When we’re creating champions: show your passion. Give people an opportunity to invest in what you’re doing, the mission with their time, treasure, and talents. Speak to them, not their company, but recognize them for what they’re good at, invite them in. Be in the room. Whether it’s you going to their committee, taking them out to lunch, or just popping in. And then I’m just gonna call us all to stay in the game. When Trayvon started this story, he talked about doing the work with students. He’s still in the field. And we desperately need people who are gonna stay in the game, even when it gets rough, who are gonna find creative ways to partner and make big things happen. So if this is your passion, I’m just gonna ask: stay in the game and tag in Trayvon, tag in us if you need any help whatsoever.
Trayvon: I did challenge somebody at APPM because we didn’t get to have lunch together. I told him, if you’re at APPM next year, I’m buying lunch for you.
Trayvon: Stay in there. Stick in there.
Jake: We need you. We need you. And y’all, we’re better together. So we will see you next Monday on another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.
Connect with Trevon Norman
Website https://serenitytexas.com/
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevon-norman-651baa45/
Consulting https://tnconsultingservices.com/
