“Passionate Pursuits: Sarah Meyers’ Journey in Youth Drug Prevention”

Hey, hey you’re listening to the Party Talk Podcast. I’m your host, Jake white from Vive 18. We exist to Empower leaders in youth drug prevention. And today, we are interviewing Sarah Meyers from Washington State. She’s involved in her local coalition. She has an awesome youth prevention club. And here I’m here to pick her brains on anything I can. And she is just on fire for her job and her mission. And this is going to be a really, really fun episode. I do have to apologize quickly. I sound a little different. I’ve been sick yesterday and today, but I didn’t want to miss this time with Sarah. So I’ve gone ahead with the the interview anyway over zoom. So if you’re looking at me on YouTube, sorry, you got to look at this. But either way, I want to keep her talking us learning from her. And all the great things that they’re doing over in Washington State. So enjoy this episode of the Party Talk Podcast. How’s your day going?

Busy, just seems like never ending tasks.

Yeah, that’s your life. Busy busy. Yeah. prevention doing the, like, prevention stuff wearing 10 different hats.

Yeah, it’s never it’s never one thing. It’s always a million different things.

Oh, that’s awesome. Well, thanks for carving out a little bit of time to talk to me.

Yeah, and the one thing that it’s good about being busy, though, is that I do like my job. And so I’m happy to talk about it. And for me to talk about my job.

Yeah, I love that. And that’s, that’s, you know what? I was talking on the phone with you. I was like, Ah, I can tell you love it.

I do. I love the concept. I love the concept of it. Because it’s like, nobody else is doing this.

Yeah. What do you mean by this? No one else is doing this.

So like, what I was at a conference. It was actually the conference in Texas. And one of the workshops was, what is your why, like, III hear that a lot. It’s kind of a buzzword. And they, they worded it a little bit differently to where it was like a little bit deeper than just a why. And it was I guess you could say, I do prevention because the science exists, and nobody is using it.

Dang. It’s, it’s like this opportunity that’s sitting right. And you’re saying why is no one doing this?

Yeah, like schools, and parents and communities. And all of this stuff is like it’s there. And it’s out on the it’s out for public use, and nobody seems to care. Or use it, you know?

Right. So it’s up to us to spread the word. Get it out there. Yep. That’s good. That’s good. Well, let’s, I mean, let’s jump right in. Just for everybody listening. They haven’t maybe they don’t know, Sarah Meyers yet. No. Give us a background on you know, where you live? What kind of work you do and how long you’ve been doing it?

“From Reluctance to Resilience: Building Youth Involvement in Prevention”

Yeah, so I live in a very rural community up here in Washington state, in Garfield County, Palmyra, Washington. We’re the least populated county in Washington State. So pretty, pretty rural here. And we’ve had a Prevention Coalition here for about 11 years, and I’ve been involved for 10 of the 11 years. Almost 10.

That’s awesome.

Yeah, it’s, um, I think you could say that, like most people who find prevention stumble into it, it’s not usually something that people set out intentionally to do.

Right? It’s a way for you or Yes.

 Yes. So I guess I graduated college with a degree in Psychology. And I moved away from my small town, and I had no intention of ever coming back because I didn’t see any career path here for professionals. B, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do anyway. And C, I just knew that I needed to get somewhere bigger with more opportunities. But I graduated with a degree in Psychology and was having a hard time finding a job. It was kind of a time period where the job market was just really crummy. And so my dad showed me this job posting in our hometown newspaper, and I had kind of I was kind of in between jobs anyway. So I was like God, I really would like to prefer not to do this though, that involved that involved like a whole entire move home. And they were like, it’s just temporary. You only need to do it for like, a couple years in order to, like, get something on your resume, you know? And I was like, No, I guess you could just say fast forward 10 years. And now I’ve made my career. Move back to the hometown.

So as we got Sarah, good job, whoever sucked her in. That’s great. Yeah. Though, so one of the things that you had told me that I found really interesting as well, is that you so the coalition has been existence for 11 years, and you didn’t get youth involved until two years ago. Tell me about what would happen.

Yeah, we’ve had youth involved in in one-offs, like, oh, there’s a conference, let’s bring some youth to it. Or there’s a small project like springs of use to it. But so I guess you could say this is a story of sustainability. So we’ve had youth involved, but it was without a plan. You know, like, there was no structure in place, there was no follow through. So they learn a whole bunch of stuff at a conference. But then everyone just goes back to their normal, everyday lives. And there’s no plan to put anything in place because everyone’s overworked people have ended, prevention just gets put to the put to the bottom of the list because we had no plan. 

We were talking about how, what needed to be in place for youth to get involved. You kind of had some youth involved in and out. But no plan. Yeah,

“Fostering Independence: A Self-Run Youth Coalition for Lasting Impact”

Yeah, yeah. And it was also a staffing thing, because there would be somebody in charge of doing youth clubs stuff, but it wasn’t like the main part of their job. So it kind of got pushed to the side. And it took us about three years of like, in depth conversations with the school and what we did in our school, we set up the youth coalition as a senior project, because our school requires senior projects for graduation requirements. And it took us it took us about three years to like get on the docket with kind of get on their radar, like, “Hey, this is something we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make it youth-led.” We also were able to get a new funding source to pay youth advisors in the school. We pay them a small stipend, and they are in the school, but their teachers and staff, because we don’t have prevention staff specific in the school. So they’re just trusted adults who could see every day so.

Wow, that’s a really cool model. Yeah, that’s a little bit yeah, paid a little bit as a stipend. And they get credit for their senior project. Does it help the dedication? Well, I know David, I know one of your students. He’s one of our ambassadors. Yes, yeah. And so I know how awesome he is, is yes, more students like that? Yes.

Yes. It’s very cool. Yeah. So our advisors, our adult advisors get paid, not the seniors. Okay, now, the seniors just take responsibility, and they have checkpoints throughout the year. They’re things that they have to do in order to turn in to say that they’re making progress, progress towards their project.

Okay. Very cool. All right. So the clarification was that the students aren’t paid, but the adviser is, which is nice, because then it’s like they’re doing extra work. And they’re getting.

It is, is a lot of work. And that’s the structure we talked about. So I think it’s really, it’s a really great idea. I think, I don’t know how you would do this and make it truly youth-lead without something, something else there to, to make it a youth- lead sort of structure.

Right? No, I think that’s a, that is a barrier. Because if you want you to be involved in the stay involved and build some momentum, if it has a structure, like a class, you’ve got them for a semester or a year. And you can create some momentum, and they can pass it down to the next year’s leaders. And what’s really unique too is seniors in high school are usually the ones who are checked out. Like, yeah, if you didn’t have this, there wouldn’t be seniors probably on your coalition. Yeah. Maybe David would because he’s so passionate about it. Yeah.

We, we did a folk so during that three years, sort of like pause, I mean, it was kind of a COVID thing too. It was a staffing thing. It was a change of funding thing. But during that like three year pause, we did a focus group with some kids who had been involved in the one offs before, who are now older, and we asked them, if you were going to redesign all of this, what would you do to make high school kids want to be involved. Because one thing that we found was that if junior high our since our school is really small, we have Junior High in high school in the same building. And what we’ve heard was that the older kids don’t want to be involved in something if it’s mostly junior high kids. And so we, we kind of had the idea that we were moving towards like an upperclassmen upperclassmen soda sort of model, because the younger kids look up to them anyway, like they’re already the coolest kids on school, like the seniors are, are the leaders of the pack, right. And so the junior high kids are involved. And it’s something that they have to look forward to. Because when you are in 10th grade and up, you can go to conferences, and things like that out of state.

Wow, that’s so smart. I think that it probably let it lead you to skip a couple steps. Because my recommendation when people ask is, should I start with middle or high school students? I say start with middle school hands down, because they buy in so much easier. Yeah, that you’re right, though, you have the influence of the juniors and seniors. So you have to wait until they become a junior or senior to enjoy that perk.

Yeah, exactly. And so we Yeah, because if you get the kids involved really young, and if it’s not seen as, I don’t know, hate using the term cool. But if it’s not truly embedded in the youth culture of the school in a way that the youth love and respond to, then they’re just going to drop off and they get older.

Yeah that’s good. All right, I’m pulling that out of my brain to know like, is the strategy of yes, middle school, but if you can embed it into the school structure for senior class project, or if they have, what are the schools I’m working with in Wisconsin, they have, they have something called communities edits for juniors in high school. So that’s there in to do that, for that. So if you can embed it in the school structure that they listening, that’s can be part of your pitch to the school.

Another part of our kind of sustainability plan is that a lot of kids want to take a dibs on their senior project a couple of years in advance, because there’s some senior projects in there in our community that are recurring, like there’s a community scholarship dinner, there’s our youth coalition. And so kids as young as 9th 10th grade are aware of kind of what is up for grabs for the senior project. So right now in our youth coalition, we have a gap where we have not, we don’t really have a group of juniors who want to take it on next year. And so we’re bringing in those 10th graders, and I can already tell that they’re, they’re going to be amazing leaders. And so they’ll they’ll actually be our leaders for two years.

Wow. That’s neat. Okay. I remember David telling me when I when I asked him to podcasts, what are the episodes so you can look back if you want to hear one of her students, David talk about his experience and why he got involved. And he did say it was like, one of the coveted experiences because you got to travel. Yeah. It’s like, everybody wants that. And how cool to have a group. People are like lining up to be a part of your coalition. How many students are able to have? What is your size look like right now?

Um, I would say that almost any kid at our school at one point probably said that they will remember, we had numbers thrown around last year that were 70. Kids. I think right now we have 40 kids, at least who are coming to meetings regularly.

Cool. That’s great. I wonder, what do you do at the meetings? Are you planning are you doing education? What does that look.

 I guess you could say this is another part of our sustainability or just makes me a bad coalition leader? I’ve never been to one. Well, they are so self-run that they don’t need me. Well, hey, that’s good. That’s good.

I know, right? It’s kind of I feel bad, but they don’t. They’re so self ran that they the kids know what they have to do. Because they know they have to complete Red Ribbon Week, they have to do XY and Z for their project. And so they get the kids together at lunchtime, and it’s announced, and they, as far as I know, they’re they’re delegating tasks like who’s going to help with Red Ribbon Week trivia? Who’s going to help set up for our Red Ribbon Week pizza party, and we have this conference coming up and we have On a Saturday, local youth event coming up and..

Wow, that’s amazing.

Yeah. And I just want to point out again, that this took years to get the relationship with the school to get a kind of a common language and a common knowledge among teachers and staff to sort of understand prevention from a, from a different perspective. And so I don’t want people to think that this is something easy, and oh, my gosh, they have such a successful youth coalition, these things take a very long time to lay the foundation for them to be successful.

“Elevating Prevention: A Vision for Effective Strategies and Continuous Innovation”

Absolutely and that’s why it’s so good that you’ve been there for a long time, because you’ve helped lay that foundation. And you’ve seen it all the way through. I would love to ask you this for we mentioned on our last call you were talking about Washington State and how it’s funded. Yeah, I don’t know if it’s thing that other states can copy. But can you tell us a little bit about that and how you’re funded?

Yeah. So our in Washington State, I believe that they use a higher percentage of substance use disorder funds towards prevention. And so we have a program here in Washington state called the Community Prevention Wellness Initiative, also known as CPWI. And the way that the prevention funding used to be about 1012 years ago, would be that each county would get a population based level of funding. And it was based on how many people live in your county, it wasn’t based on the risk factors in your county or your community. So it wasn’t enough money to really dig in and do deep community level change. It was mostly just enough money to do like some media campaigns and pay a person and that was pretty much it. So they did something called the prevention read redesign initiative PRI, where they gave a huge chunk of money to the most high need community in each county. And they did one new cohort a year to sort of build the programs slowly. And our community was identified as a cohort three. And right now I think they’re up to cohort seven or eight or nine. And what started was the first goal was to get one CPWI, a community coalition in every county, and now they’re going through and doing additional to the bigger counties. So I think that there are almost 100 fully funded community coalition’s here in our state. So wow, 100 communities, 100 school districts who have this opportunity with this funding. Okay.

Okay and that is, that is like taxpayer dollars being allocated specifically to prevention. It’s not like you have to, I’m sure you still have to apply for certain things. But it’s just like, oh, no, you don’t. Okay.

Yeah, it’s actually, um, it’s actually really great, because this will used to be funds that counties would get anyway, like, if you rent a county, you get a road department, you get county government, and you get a little bit for health. And a little little dark part of that funding for health is also drug and alcohol prevention. So we don’t have to apply every year. The only major burden, I guess, is that what makes the program so successful, is it is also extremely detailed. And so our plans are very, very detailed. Our budgets are very, very detailed. We spend a lot of time reporting activities, we spend a lot of time working with the state and working with our prevention system manager to make sure that we are doing good prevention, and only evidence based programs.

 Yeah, no, that’s good. I had, I had a call with Washington and with Utah, where they had a document saying, Does your does your program align with these standards of effective prevention strategies? And I was, it was so refreshing to have that to see the accountability that is within the state, and that other states are, you know, tagging on now and learning from it too. And a lot of the a lot of the things that I’ve learned because I’ve been, you know, I accidentally got into prevention like most people, but

Well we all, we all accidentally get into prevention.

Right but I didn’t even know what I was just throwing sober house parties and I college is always like building community. So Well, the whole learning curve, about everything about prevention strategies, and the frameworks, and all the evidence based programs, is very new. And so for me, it’s really cool to see how we can fit Vive 18 into those programs as well. And there’s a lot of excitement around building partnerships, because I was, I’ll be completely honest with you, I was at a call with another school in Washington, and they had big dreams. And I love it when people dream big. So I’m like, yes, okay, we’re starting prevention clubs, they’re gonna throw events, speaking is just a launching point to get youth involved. It’s not the end all be all. We’re using a toolkit to reinforce the factors and do restorative justice programming. And they’re all like,“hey, how do we measure this? Is it evidence based?” And I’m like,“Okay, this is not my cup of tea.” Like that would be a red flag for most people. But I luckily have partners that helped me with evidence based strategies. And my answer is always, let’s create whatever we need to use to measure it. In your community, I am totally open to any of those things, because we can’t keep using, you know, old strategies that didn’t make a difference. And if we want innovation, like we have to innovate, to try new things that our culture is changing so fast, but we have to measure it, too. So I think that’s so so important.

Yeah, I love that I just am so excited to be a part of this such a young field, where we’re kind of doing, like, there’s still a lot of bad prevention out there. And I think those of us who understand sort of the new, the new way of doing prevention, it’s not shame based. It’s not fear based. It’s yes, drugs and alcohol are a problem. But the kids using, that’s just a sign that there’s a deeper issue. It’s not really about demonizing drugs, or drug users, it’s just recognizing that this is a risk factor for youth. And when you make your community healthier, a byproduct is just less drug use. So yeah, it’s I see prevention as kind of a concept. Rather, what more than anything else, because it’s not really something you can explain in one sentence or one conversation.

“Insights from Adverse Childhood Experiences and Positive Childhood Experiences”

Yeah. Okay, I would love to end on this Sarah. Because I can tell you’re passionate, and you know a lot about prevention. So I’m going to challenge you to pick one thing, one area of prevention that you like, you’re into, maybe you’re most passionate about. And can you share a couple tips on that area that maybe people listening? If you have good ideas, they can steal along? Or they can learn from anything?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So when I first got started in the prevention field, was 2013-2014. And the hot topic at that time was the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, there was a documentary filmed in a town nearby my town called Walla Walla. And the documentary was called Paper Tigers. And it was about an alternative school, who changed their disciplinary methods, to be restorative and to be trauma informed. And to understand that the kid who is violent in the classroom, there’s a reason for that. They said, all behavior is communication. And the reasons that we see behaviors and kids is there’s always a deeper meaning for it. And so I think, just looking at the adverse childhood experiences, is something that I’m very interested in. You haven’t heard about the Adverse Childhood Childhood Experiences Study, there’s tons of information online, but it’s basically calculates the trauma that you experienced as a child and things that are not your fault. And we know that if you have more aces, you’re more likely to use drugs, when you’re older, you’re more likely to have mental health issues, you’re more likely to be incarcerated, you’re more likely to even have cancer and diabetes and heart disease, because of the trauma that gets down into your cells and your brain. And it’s not these kids is fault. So the thing that gets me excited about prevention is the adverse childhood experiences study that says that people who grow up to use drugs are not bad people. They just had a life that was not conducive to normal typical brain development. And then that something, something that came across my I guess, interests, things that I’ve heard at conferences and things like that was the positive childhood experiences study. And the Positive Childhood Experiences Study studied things in kids lives that seemed to counteract the negative. And the positive childhood experiences are things like you feel connected to school, you have a good high school experience, you have more than two people who you can talk to, you have more than two adults, you’re close with, you feel close with adults who are not your parents, things like that. And I just love that because I love that this is scientifically proven. I think one of the positive childhood experiences is participating in community traditions, is literally evidence based to show reductions in drug use and mental health issues. So I love those two studies together, but complement each other.

Wow, that’s cool. Okay, so if you’re listening, check out Aces Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Positive Childhood Experiences. And doing some research, because I’m sure that there are some awesome trainings on how to use this information to do that more effective prevention, and it can help inform your strategies and everything like that.

Exactly. There’s another kind of jumping off the PCE, there’s also a new health science area called H-O-P-E, HOPE and the acronym is Health Outcomes from Positive Experiences. And that’s a really even more brand new area of science that I find incredibly interesting. So if you want to talk about self-care, that is like evidence based self care.

Yeah, that’s cool. Okay, I love how you are nerding out about this stuff, like but I would go out, or people, people like you in the field that are doing, like super into the research. So you can help inform different programs that are out there and different coalitions. Because we got to talk about how Washington seems to be on the cutting edge of prevention. And there’s a lot of studies done at the Universities. Yes. And y’all are moving, it seems like in a very positive direction.

Yeah big time. There are some amazing prevention leaders in our state who’ve been involved with the prevention redesign initiative. Way even back before it was called that, and with the Community Prevention Wellness Initiative, CPWI. There are people in my field who have literally published documents on what works and what doesn’t work in prevention. And we have shared those with the nation. My colleague, Joe Nigel, wrote the what works and what doesn’t work in prevention handbook, and it’s it can’t ish, it goes into all of the data about how scare tactics are shown to not be effective, how having one off speakers is not shown to be effective things that that portray a teen as a drug user, whether they’re acting or using those beer goggles, things that portray a child as a has as having use drugs are not effective. There’s so many things that you can study. And one of the things I heard along my years of training was, are we being busy? Or are we being effective? And I think, I think there’s so much stuff that we do, that is busy, but it’s not effective. And it’s hard. It’s hard to always do the evidence based thing, because a lot of times, they’re not as fun. They’re not as glamorous, they’re not as showy. They don’t feel like you did something like one of the places My heart is not as passionate about would be prevention policy. It’s so those things are really, really hard. But we have to balance. We have to balance the fun stuff with the stuff that acts actually shown to work.

So yeah, well said. Well, this has been awesome. Sarah, I can’t wait to see you in a few weeks at Southwest Prevention Fest. That’d be really fun to have you if you have people listening in you and you don’t know about it yet. Basically, we’re teaching students public speaking skills, social media skills, and then also event planning skills and they’ll get to practice and leave with a plan leave with social media videos that they’ve created together. And of course, we are throwing an amazing after party. And I think you’re probably coming from the farthest point because right we’ll have to have something special for you.

That’s exciting. Well, one of our like I said, our youth coalition leaders are, they’re taking it on as their senior project. And so they feel a deep honor. They feel a deep sense of ownership about everything prevention, because they have, they present it to a board of community members during senior exit interviews. So they feel a huge amount of ownership and one of our youth coalition members, David, was approached at the CADCA conference to be a Youth Ambassador. And apparently, he’s been doing all of these things behind the scenes. And then he asks us if there’s funding to go to a youth conference in Arizona. And my first reaction was you did what, and your youth ambassador for who? And you’ve been doing all this stuff on your own time on the side? And he was like, yeah, absolutely. We’ll go and so he’s, he’s a senior, and he’s recruiting some sophomores for us to to continue the project when they graduate. So David’s a really cool kid. So we’re going to be his cheerleading squad down there.

I love it.

And Arizona is one of the states that I’ve never connected with on anything prevention related. It seems like I’ve connected with a lot of different programs and a lot of other states but haven’t connected with what they do in Arizona. So that’ll be a great, great connection. 

Yeah, I’ll, I’ll definitely be introducing you to some incredible people because we’re not too shabby. All right. This has been awesome. Sarah, thank you so much for being on the Party Talk Podcast where we Empower leaders in youth drug prevention, and if you are listening, I’ll see you next Monday for another episode.