Overview of IABH and Its Initiatives

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White. today we’re hanging out with two new friends. So Riley Cleary is the Prevention Program Director and we’ve also got Michaela Price, who is a Prevention Specialist at the Illinois Association for Behavioral Health, or we’ll call them IABH.

And they’re here to talk about one of four youth initiatives at their office called Operation Snowball. And personally, I was blown away because I did some work over in Illinois. I got to meet some people who are work with Operation Snowball and some students and was just blown away. So Michaela and Riley, welcome to the Drug Prevention Power Hour.

Thank you, thanks so much. Thank you for having us.

Yeah, I’m pumped. I’m pumped. This is going to be so fun. And I love that there’s three of us here too. So this is going to be a blast. I would love to just learn a little bit before we dive into Operation Snowball. By the way, teaser, anyone looking to get youth involved in prevention, like this is your episode for sure. Let’s get an overview of IABH though. And just like, what does your organization do? And like, what’s your scope?

Diving into Operation Snowball

Such a great question. So IABH is at its core a membership association. So we serve ⁓ a lot of different associations, which are companies that hold intensive outpatient. They hold inpatient. They hold addiction counseling. And we have kind of two sides of the coin at IABH. We have our membership side, which is kind of what I just explained, serving them, going to the Capitol and advocating for a lot of laws that we want to see happen in IABH that will better our associations as well as our clients that are getting the services that they really do need. And then on our side of the pond, we like to say is our prevention side. So we have our four youth initiatives at our office. It’s so exciting to say four because we just recently got our fourth one in the last year. And there’s a lot of really exciting things happening with that one. So first and foremost is the Sabrina Goodman Teen Institute, CGTI. We actually just had our five day youth conference in July at Eastern Illinois University. So CGTI is a statewide leadership conference, just as if, you know, adults, you and I might go to a conference for professional development. CGTI is exactly that for student leaders across Illinois and even beyond, if they’re interested in coming that want to expand their leadership, expand their knowledge in ATOD education, and just be better humans to know how to go back to their communities and how to make a positive change when they go back to school.

So that’s CGTI. Snowball’s really close in relation. We like to call it the daughter program of CGTI because Snowball was actually created from a group of students that were attending the Teen Institute. They were actually from Rockford, Illinois. And they said, you know, this conference is great. We love coming to CGTI. We only get to do it in the summer. Why can’t we do it year round? So they kind of kickstarted the idea of how to keep prevention going throughout the year and that’s exactly what Snowball is, which you know, we’ll dive into a ton in the episode. So Snowball evolved from CGTI. And then our two most recent other youth initiatives are the Focus Youth Gambling Prevention Program. So a lot of our information that we’re reviewing and getting in our Illinois Youth Survey and data polls is that gambling is really present in youth lives.

And we are trying to find a space to get into school districts to have tabling at their events to really educate them on, know, students might not be engaging in it, but they are seeing it. And we know the trend in prevention, if you see it, if it’s involved in your life, the higher likelihood of you potentially participating it later in life does increase. that is one program. have a lot of different campaigns that we offer through our focus programming to just expand and bring awareness to youth prevention for gambling. And then our final youth initiative is Generation Lead. That is a statewide campaign that is going to be promoting substance use prevention and education statewide in schools, in communities, in coffee shops. And teaser, Jake, we actually are in the midst right now of filming some commercials that will be coming out for a Generation Lead program. you know, we’ve continued to expand in prevention since, what is it, Michaela, 1974  is when CGTI started and we’ve continued to expand and bring more and more initiatives to the table because prevention matters and students need to have it. So yeah, we got really some four really great programs at our office.

Yeah, 1974. I’m as a listener and host of the podcast right now, I get to listen live recording it with you right now. I am, I was like, oh my gosh, these initiatives are incredible. And then you said 1974. this is so cool. Lesson number one of the episode, stay in the prevention game. You can’t be jealous of someone else’s success if you don’t stay in the game. This is so, that is awesome.

Those are incredible. so were you both at CGTI? This last one? Yeah, y’all had Zion, Zion Givens.

He has a special place in my heart that man, just the energy, the power, the passion, he just fully dives into our students and that’s what we want out of our speakers that come to our events. And he just, I mean, at one point he was playing basketball with the kids during free time. So that’s someone who’s in it to win it. Yeah, he’s the best. He’s the best.

Yes. Oh my gosh. So he’s our mental health expert on the Vive 18 team. And I get more messages from students on our account whenever we send him out, just like, hey, thank you so much. Like, Z was incredible. We had so much fun. Or like, I’m going to go ask for help now. Like, he connected so well. I’m so proud of him. And I love the way that he embodies this posture. And I see it from YouTube, just knowing you a little bit is like, you’re here for the work. And if that means spending extra time sitting at lunch with these students, like every interaction is prevention. And so it is no surprise to me that he’s playing basketball with students and jumping in and talking about life. It’s so, so cool. Michaela, I want to ask you, out of the four initiatives, what is the one that maybe has your heart the most or that you love diving into the most?

Yeah, it’s definitely gonna be Operation Snowball. As straight out of college, this is my first job with my degree, so it is just a full circle moment for me to get to interact with these students every day and my coworkers who are as passionate about prevention and mental health awareness within these students and communities. It’s just a grateful experience every day.

That’s incredible. That’s so good. Well, let’s definitely dive in because I mean, Operation Snowball. So we talked about the scope of IABH. Tell me about the scope of Operation Snowball. What is it in like simplest form? What is that? And then also who uses it? Where is it?

Yeah, so Operation Snowball is an international youth organization. We kind of work with prevention, education, mental health awareness, community advocacy, and leadership development. Our biggest goal is just empowering our student leaders to make positive impacts in their community and in their lives. And honestly, we have teams all over the state of Illinois that we work with. We have teams in Arizona, Texas. We also have a team in Ireland who we love and adore and they attend as many events as they can make it to. And we’re always looking to bring new teams in through other states, other countries. Whoever wants our messaging and programming, we would love to be able to give to and connect with.

Yeah, and just to expand on top of that, Makayla, it’s like a perfect explanation of who we are and kind of who we service. You know, what does Snowball do? What is our end goal? What does it look like when it’s implemented in the community? At IBH, we are the support to the adult mentors. The adult mentors, a lot of times, are school counselors, they’re social workers, they’re teachers, they’re administration. Sometimes they might be management in youth coalitions as well.

And they have a cohort of youth leaders that want to make positive change. So they sign on for free to be a snowball team. And we work directly with those adults to really build their group of student leaders. We talk about data. We have them really look at numbers and say, you know, what is the perceived concern in the community? Is it you think that everyone in grade 12 is drinking underage in their free time? Great. Let’s look at the data. Let’s see if that’s true and happening in the community. And let’s find a way to really address that concern. So they dive in, they look at where the numbers really lie, and then they try and figure out a plan of how do they want to address this challenge this school year and what are they going to do and how are they going to do it. So we kind of tell our teams often, so we call them our snowball team. So we tell them there’s a lot of times two different routes where you can go a route where you can via retreat or an event style snowball team. And that’s what a lot of our older snowball teams signed up to do where they would have kind of like a mini-CGTI actually, Jake, where they would have an event that’s two days or one day that they bring in speakers to talk about all these topics that are important, mental health, grief and loss, addiction, empowerment, how to raise your self-esteem any kind of concern that’s happening in the community, they might find a speaker to talk to the group and to the students at the event. They also go to workshops and they go to small group sessions where they have conversations with their peers that are peer-led to talk about, what did you learn from that speaker? Did you agree with them? Why, why not? How can you connect this back to your life? And we say all the time, Snowball at its core is youth-led, adult-supported.

And it’s true even how snowball started in 1977 that a group of students were the ones that said that they wanted it and wanted to do more. So it’s a really unique opportunity to be a part of a snowball team that has events or retreats as we call them. And then kind of the other side are prevention campaigns where they can do monthly campaigns like alcohol awareness month, mental health awareness, suicide prevention, or maybe they just might do a stress reduction day if it’s during finals.

Whatever to their core that they want to achieve that year, they can find resources from us. They can find toolkits. We go and help train them. We train them in how to facilitate conversations with their peers, because that’s a skill that’s not always just learned and picked up. If you see someone do it, you really have to practice it too. So there are so many different levels of being a snowball team in so many ways to enact that positive change. And that Kayla and I geek out about this all the time. The coolest part is every single team does something different and every team puts the passion, the love, the time to plan it. And, you know, we don’t get to have the direct impact. We step back and we support them and train them and give them the tools and resources. And then we get to say, holy cow, you just did the dang thing. Like, look at the tool you just made. Do you know how powerful and how incredible you are? And then to get them to come back to CGTI, we see them again and then they do it again.

Yeah and they do something different every single year. So yeah, Snowball’s pretty special. It’s pretty incredible.

That is, it gets me fired up. we were just at the, like it’s called CADCA. Do y’all know that conference? That organization. Okay. That’s, I mean, I feel like whenever we go to CADCA, it feels like home and talking to you, feels like home because you’re talking about student led adult guided. You’re talking about looking at the data. What are the needs of the community and how can we help and putting it into students hands.

Personal Stories and Impact of Snowball

Yes, that these students not only get to learn, but they get to lead. They get to build self-efficacy and really own their influence. That’s life-changing experiences. And it makes sense why you two are now part of the organization. It wasn’t enough just to grow up in this stuff and to be a part of it, but you are a product of the program and now you’re investing back into it, which is incredible.

I want to ask you little bit about that, but I also have some things that I’m sure people are wondering. Why is it called Operation Snowball? Let’s do that. And then what got you involved in it?

Yeah, Michaela, you take that first one. Why is that our name?

Yeah, so Operation Snowball came from the fact that these students thought if they had a positive impact on one person, that person could go and have a positive impact on someone else and the effect just snowballs. So there came our name, you know, the positive impacts are just snowballing around them and we love it. We love to tell that story.

That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And Riley, how did you first, wait, Michaela, were you also in it as a student? I was not, no.

Okay, that was Riley. Riley, what got you into it? Like if you can remember, right? Like when you first started going, what was it about that that got you into it and why did you stay? And I mean, now never leave. Yeah.

Yeah, Jake, that’s huge life question. My goodness. I was introduced to it. I’m the youngest of three. So my older siblings went to it, were involved in it in my hometown. And my mom said, great, they did it. They loved it. It’s your turn. So I was introduced in middle school in 2006. I loved it. was positive. It was fun. I didn’t think that there was anything more than just that one day event. I thought it was just like, I get to do this thing and hang out with high school students. They’re awesome. They were nice to me. I love it. And then I got to high school and one of the first few days of my sophomore year, actually, one of my best friends passed away. He just didn’t wake up. No one knew kind of knew what happened and that impacted me severely. That impacted our friend group severely. And I was having a really tough time at the start of the school year and snowball came up that November and

My mom had a relationship with a social worker because my siblings went through the program and she said, you have to have my daughter come to your program. She needs it more now than ever. And I looked at her and said, don’t you dare make me spend four days away from my friends. Like they’re my people right now. I’m not leaving them. I’m not doing this. I went anyways, and tell everyone all the time that it was a life-changing weekend. It was four days that flipped my entire perspective on grief, on loss, on purpose, on passion, and I haven’t left since. I immediately wanted to be a leader after I left that event. So I was a leader for the next year school snowball. And then my senior year high school, I wanted to be the overall team director and help plan the entire thing. I got to do that. And that led me to my career in social work.

So I got my master’s in social work because of this program. I knew that I wanted to work with teens and adolescents because I had an impactful experience and I wanted to have some component of that in my life and in my career. And funny enough,  went to college. I went to CGTI for the first time, Jake, a few years later. I met my husband, my now husband there. yeah, I feel like everything in my life kept bringing me back to these programs to the purpose they just kept shaping me in different ways every single year. And, and then, you know, finishing college and being able to kind of, say all the time, I got my dream job. You know, I have the, I had the position that Michaela has now, which started with snowball so I got to have kind of a seat at the table to give back to these programs, to help shape these programs for these student leaders, for those participants in a way that I never thought was imaginable.

And being able to really, I just, just put forth, I guess, the best effort to make someone else’s experience that much more impactful and life-changing as well that I know that I have. So yeah, I mean, these programs can, like I said, change your life.

Wow, that is absolutely incredible. And the way that your story is woven through, yeah, that’s really inspiring. And I think a lot of people in this field, they either had a bad or a great experience that got them into wanting to make a difference for prevention or recovery or mental health. And so thank you both for saying yes to that and leaning into it to still be doing it know, Jake and Michaela talks all the time too about her experience not being able to be a part of it in high school. Do you want to share that Michaela too and kind of how it’s a little different from my experience and how the programs have shaped you since?

Tips for Starting Peer-Led Prevention Clubs

Yeah, totally. you know, I didn’t grow up in snowball or CGTI. I didn’t even grow up in the state of Illinois so coming into all of this, was a bit of a culture shock at first. tell everyone, like, I was not prepared for how into it our students get. but every event that I go to, every training that I host, it just reminds me why I’m doing this reminds me that even, know, at end of the day, I’m making a change in that one student’s life and it makes, you know, all the crazy phone calls and long hours completely worth it. And as you know, just every interaction just reminds me how important what we do is, and I’m super excited to continue working in this field.

That’s incredible. And I know you mentioned like, I wasn’t prepared for how, how into it the students get. And I haven’t been to CGTI, but I’ve been to TTI in Tennessee. And I had that same experience of like, whoa, what kind of culture has been built here? Cause it’s, it’s decades in the making and these students sing songs, they do dances, they do cheers. They’re like, they’re so amped up to be around each other that, and I think y’all might have this too, there are volunteers who went through it 20, 25 years ago and they’re still helping out today. And that is a testament to something that’s really worth doing.

I definitely want to ask you all too, because there’s people on this call that are probably thinking, great, can I start a snowball or what’s even if I, like I can probably go to check out your resources, to look at what you do. Before we like lock in some ways they can directly ask you for help. Can you give us some tips? Like you’ve been helping start and support these student led clubs and there are people listening to this, they approach 518 because they want to get more young people involved in prevention. So could you, I mean, just off the cuff, share some tips for starting peer-led prevention clubs or getting youth to be interested in mental health and prevention? What tips might you have?

Final Thoughts and Advice

Michaela, you start us off. Yeah, totally. I was gonna say, you know, I have these conversations all the time with my adult mentors that I work with, but a lot of times it’s, you want to look within your school and see who those natural born leaders are, you know, talk to the other teachers, guidance counselors, principals, anybody that’s interacting with your students and be like, hey, who do you know that would be a good fit for this? I also tell a lot of my teams, you know, if they want to partner with a national honor society or a wellness club anything like that has a lot of the principles that we share and a lot of the same values and drive that we share. So I always recommend starting there if they don’t, if they’re starting from the ground. Riley, do you have anything else to add on that?

Okay, that’s good, that’s good.

I think Jake, you know, when we have individuals that come to our association or email us, call us and say, what can I do? How can I start this? We either have a student or we have an adult. If we have an adult, they already have kind of gone over that hump and that hurdle that a lot of our students have to go through if they’re starting from scratch. You know, if an adult knows that they want to do it, a lot of times adults come to us that are an alum through our program that moved to Arizona, moved to Kentucky, and they wanted to start a snowball team.

You know, we tell them exactly that that Michaela just shared, you know, go to your teachers, look for different leaders, have them recommend one person in their class. You get one person from every person, every teacher, and then you start with 10. You start with 20. You know, you don’t have to start with your massive group. You can still make an impact with three people. You can still make an impact with 20. No matter where you start, it’s that you understand what you’re doing. You’re on the same playing field. You are planning it out together and you’re implementing it, right? You’re doing it. You’re doing essentially the strategic prevention framework, right? That is our bread and butter of prevention. But when you have a student that come to us and they say that they want to start this or they want to bring snowball to the community, they have to find an adult. So a lot of times if it’s in a school or if it’s in a youth led agency, finding that adult that is interested and that is willing to put in the time, a lot of times they come to us and say, you know, what time commitment do I have to have to be this adult mentor?

And we’re able to talk through them and say, you know, this is what it is, this is what we offer, you aren’t on your own. We a lot of times have monthly calls with new teams to really help that adult mentor create the process of making a brand new snowball team from scratch based on evidence that we’ve seen that has been helpful and supportive and successful for all of our teams too. But you know, once they find that adult, it’s bring in a friend, have that friend bring in a friend know, bring in more, have your goal to be five for the first year. And maybe that first goal event of that school year is that you want to do a tabling event during finals week and give out little stress, stress wellness tool kits to everyone and just say, good luck. Here are some stress management tips that is still going to impact someone’s life. And that is going to change the culture of that school, whether you know it or not. And then next year, your name’s going to expand even more. You can bring more people in as well.

Now other tips and tricks too, I think that I would recommend to people that really want to bring this to their community is once you have students that understand and are invested, use them to talk to your community members. Have them create a presentation and go to the Lions Club and say, hey, we really love a sponsor of some funding so that we can do X, Y, and Z. They present a presentation. They show a poster board because you want to hear it from the kids. They’re the ones that ar experiencing it and they’re the best ones to talk about it. So give them the space. know, Michaela and I say all the time in our meetings, if there is a place for a student to have a seat at the table, let them and fill it because their voice needs to be heard and should be heard. And just continue to have that in the back of your mind that you’re doing it. You’re interested in these programs. If you’re an adult, because you care about the students and their wellbeing and their experience. So have them be at that table.

Yes. I’m echoing all of that. And I’m going to add there’s a part of us as adult, like mentors and people who are guiding youth, where if we have this this little thing where we want to be perfect or we think it needs to be done a certain way, like that’s that’s one of the hardest things to get rid of, because you do have to when you have a student group, realize that that student is going to do half as good as you at performing that speech, but it’s going to have twice the impact.

100% just because of who they are, right? Like it’s huge. And that’s why I’m guessing that’s why your movement has grown so much and you are in like, it’s making impact. All your events have grown, the clubs are taking off. And that’s something as an adult advisor, you just kind of have to realize like, hey, I’m here not because we have to have the best club. It’s literally a learning opportunity for these students where they’re going to create and they’re going to fail and they’re going to share and they’re gonna learn, and that’s the whole program. It doesn’t even have to be good to make a huge difference. Like, that’s the whole program.

Yeah right. The purpose is to help them learn to be good humans, how to be their own person and how to go into the world once they leave high school to do whatever they want to do. Right. It’s that’s that’s the core, Jake. Yeah.

That’s so cool. All right. So I’m going to have you give us the shortest version that you can. Riley, Michaela, I want to be a snowball advisor. What do I got to do? Run me through a quick five minute bullet point orientation and then tell us where to go to get the full one.

Yeah, totally. So to become a snowball advisor or a team, all you have to do is go to our website, fill out our accreditation form. It’s quick, it’s free, and we will schedule a meeting with you after that and just kind of introduce ourselves, get to know you. From there, we’ll schedule two trainings, an adult implementation training and a student facilitation training. Both of those are free as well and really dive into the different aspects and roles in snowball.

⁓ And then from there, we just kind of support our teams and however, whatever programming they do. ⁓ And then it just followed up by a yearly accreditation form that we send out to all of our teams in May and sweet, simple, you know, supports our teams and meets them where they’re at.

If you go to operationsnowballinc.org, that’s where you can find all the information to be a snowball team. We offer a lot of different free benefits as well. We not only have one-on-one coaching to all of our teams, no matter how long you’ve been a snowball team, we also have trainings, we have events throughout the year because our job at Operations Snowball Inc. is to provide you and your students with education and tools to continue to make a positive impact through prevention education. So that’s why we have all these different options and resources and trainings and tools for you. So that way, hopefully we’re giving you the education that you need in an easier platform that you don’t have to go searching for it as well.

This is so cool. And I, I, I can say this with a hundred percent integrity. If anybody is listening to this, this podcast and you’re working with five 18, you’re bringing in a vibe 18 speaker because you want to get young people involved in prevention. Like that’s a lot of the reasons why people bring us out is to show, prevention is fun. You can make a difference because our program was started the same way yours was as student leaders.

And so if you are bringing out a Vive 18 speaker, me, Zion, Tomas, Tom, Trevor, whoever it might be, one of our newest, and you want to start operation Snowball, take advantage of two great resources because like Snowball has all the resources and the follow-up built into their model. That’s, that’s amazing. Why not benefit from 30 years? Wait, even more of experience.

We’re almost 50. Yeah, we’ll be almost 50, 50 years of experience. That’s wild. Why not benefit from that? Like even if you’re using us, there’s, and I say this a lot, there is no competition in the prevention field. None of us are competing. We are all better together. So if you have ideas or you resonate with this, like do not hesitate to ask, make a request, say, Hey, we want to start a specifically a snowball club because we want to take advantage of those things. And really, does it really matter what the students brand it as, right? They’re creating that club, they’re doing the impact. Take advantage, get in contact with Riley Michaela and take advantage of this. And it was snowballinc.org. All right. I don’t know why I feel compelled to ask you, is there a final piece of advice for anyone in prevention or a quote that you love, and then we’ll say goodbye.

I put you on the spot. I put you on the spot for sure got mine. yeah, we were wrapping up CDKI and you know, we were there with all of our volunteer staffs. And one of our volunteer staff said, you know, the work that we do changes lives. And that, you know, sticks with me every day since we’ve gotten back, you know, and I see the impact that that week had, but also the work that we do day in and day out. So, you know, the work we do changes lives and saves lives and It’s important to keep that in the forefront of our minds as we go forward.

I love that, Michaela. I think I would add on to that as a, as a tip. I would say, if anything in this podcast made you excited, made you ⁓ intrigued, made you want to jump in and just find out more. ⁓ know, we have speakers tell us all the time that it’s good to be uncomfortable because when you’re uncomfortable, that means good change is going to happen. And if you have that feeling in your gut, if you have that feeling where you’re like, can I do this? I really want to. Can I make this impact? The answer is yes, you can. You absolutely can. And we’re here to help you make that impact, how you see it happening in your community. trust yourself, trust your gut and know that you can do it. And there’s a community of people in prevention behind you, supporting you, cheering you on the whole way.

That was incredible. I cannot say anything better than that. Y’all stay in the game, reach out, whatever you need. And we’ll see you all next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.