Understanding Communities That Care

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, Shelby Hall. And I’m going to tell you a little bit about her first and then we’ll get diving into some incredible content to leave you with today. So Shelby is a prevention specialist with Southwest Montana Prevention who leads and coordinates a community prevention coalition, Gallatin Valley Communities That Care they utilize the Communities That Care framework to streamline, strengthen, and sustain prevention efforts within their counties. So Shelby, thank you for being on the show today.

Yeah, I am just, I’m pumped. I’m so ready for this. Hoping to bring some good information for everyone to share because I’ve been gleaming off of all of the other episodes that you guys have had.

Yes, and I love it. I love when I get an email like yours. It’s like, Jake, I listened to all the episodes and you mentioned communities that care and that’s what I’m passionate about. And I was like, well, let’s do an episode because somebody who’s using something is the great person to help share that with other people, especially if you’re so in love with it, you’re, you are eager to say yes at opportunities. So, thank you for saying yes.

Yes, absolutely, I’m ready to share.

Awesome. Well, let’s start just a little bit about you, how you got into prevention, and then we’ll dive into the framework that you’re going to teach us all.

Yeah, absolutely. So I am a prevention specialist that I’m trained by Southwest Montana Prevention. I did not grow up thinking I would, I didn’t even know this was a job. I feel like that’s what everyone’s story is. It’s just not even an option. I started in the natural resource world and kind of managed forests essentially and studied wildlife.

After I moved out to Montana though, I got certified as a personal trainer and taught at the local university, taught like glorified PE classes is what I like to say. When I saw this position open up, I didn’t think I was qualified. But as I started talking with them more and they saw my resume, they told me, said, Shelby, you’ve been doing prevention in all of these other sectors.

But you get it, you get the framework of working upstream, working ahead of the game to prevent something bigger from happening. And so I landed up kind of working in prevention for youth behavioral health problems.

Wow, that’s cool. I love what they said to you as well. You’ve been doing this work because you’re helping get ahead of the problem. And that’s such a great way to talk about prevention. it’s simple and accessible too. It doesn’t have to be something fancy or scary. It’s something we all do every day, even if we don’t know it.

The Importance of Prevention

Right, right. It’s, what you always have to ask yourself, what are you ultimately preventing? And, you know, when I worked in natural resource, in the natural resource world, it was prevention of, you know, invasive species infestations. And when I worked as a personal trainer, you know, you’re preventing osteoporosis or heart disease and you study behavior change. And so it all just led me to this awesome place of prevention for kiddos.

Wow, that is so cool. I’m glad you’re in the field with us. So let’s learn a little bit more about this model that you use. It’s called Communities That Care. And before we dive in, for anybody who’s listening to this podcast, they’re probably doing prevention already. So how does this fit into something they might already know about? How would you describe what is Communities That Care?

Totally. So communities that care is essentially a framework. I like to say it’s a way to streamline, strengthen, and sustain prevention efforts. And there’s all kinds of frameworks out there. Oftentimes, if a prevention specialist is working within a county, they might have heard of the SPF, the Strategic Prevention Framework. It’s almost a supplemental or next step to the SPF that makes it really easy for not only prevention specialists to implement in their community, but also community members to get involved and to kind of be trained in the prevention science world.

Okay, very cool. Well, let’s dive in. I don’t know if you’re prepared for this, Shelby, but like if you are teaching someone for the first time about communities that care, how, like, can you teach us right now?

The Five Phases of Communities That Care

Totally, all right, totally. And we’ll just get the classroom opened up right now. ⁓ So the first thing I always like to tell people is a story. So if you don’t mind, I’m gonna share a story. And it’s, okay, good, good. So this is a story about a river. And the river is, let’s say it’s a beautiful river that runs through, I live in Montana. So it’s a lovely river that runs through a small town in Montana. And it’s a river loved by all.

We love stories. People like to recreate in it, fish, boat. There’s even a waterfall near the downtown, which has a beautiful overlook. So beloved river. One day though, community members see people in the river and it doesn’t seem like they want to be in the river. And turns out these people were getting swept up in the current and unable to get out. They ended up toppling over the water and becoming severely injured, lots of injuries, even a couple of deaths. And the community, of course, is distraught about these tragedies, that they come together and say, okay, what do we wanna do? How can we stop this? And so they pull together and they put an ambulance at the bottom of the waterfall to quickly take the people to the hospital after they’ve fallen over. If I were to end the story there, how would we feel about that ending of the story? It typically doesn’t feel complete. We’re preventing deaths, maybe long-term injuries, but we don’t want them falling in the river in the first place. So one gentleman understands that. He turns away from the waterfall altogether and people are shouting at him, where are you going? What are you doing? And he shouts back and he says, I’m going upstream to see why people are falling in the river in the first place.

And that is exactly what prevention is, is looking at the reason why something’s happening, leading to the problem. And that’s exactly what the Center for Communities that Care did, in the University of Washington, which is where it came out of. And they started looking at the risk factors that are leading to certain behavioral health problems. For instance, we know that family conflict or unhealthy family management, can lead to various behavioral health problems. And the six behavioral health problems that they looked into in research are teenage pregnancy, school dropout, delinquency, violence, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. So they look at all of those and find different risk factors that correlate with each of those behavioral health problems. And so that’s what they started researching, all good and dandy, but then they started asking themselves, okay, well,

Now what? How are we going to have people reduce risk factors and then also enhance protective factors in the community? We’ve got prevention specialists, they’re doing a great job, but they can’t do it all. And so they created this framework to train community members on prevention science and what risk factors and protective factors are. They even train people on how to create a sustainable, effective coalition.

And then they look through local data to make educated and data-driven decisions within the community. And they do it all within a five-phase process, similar to the SPF, but little different organization as far as which phase is what.

Okay. Whoa. All right. This is cool. So already I’ve learned a great analogy to explain prevention is the river. That’s such an important and relatable thing to say, yeah, someone’s falling in the river, they get hurt. Going to help the person that is hurt isn’t prevention. It’s still important, but it’s not prevention. Let’s ask why they’re falling in the river and what can we do about it? The other thing you mentioned is part of this framework is that it’s looking, it’s helpful for training community members, maybe starting or running your coalition and then making data driven decisions.

How would you say, yeah, how is it helpful in those three areas? If I were say like, well, can I just train community members just like, I don’t know, on my own without this framework or start a coalition without it? What are some things that have been really helpful for you that you’ve seen have come out of the framework?

Totally It’s almost like we planned this and we really didn’t, but you’re asking the perfect questions. Like, here’s the next thing that I’m going to talk about. ⁓ So you just rocked that. So the great thing of within the five phases, like I said, there’s those five phases. Within those, there’s things called milestones and benchmarks. So within all of this, the Communities That Care Center, the Center for Communities That Care out of the University of Washington provides you with technical assistance if you would like it, and then basically all of the materials of, here’s what you need to do next, and here’s how to achieve it. And they’ll provide training throughout every single step. So one of the benchmarks might be if you’re in like phase two of creating the coalition, asking the question of,

Okay, what are the work groups that we want and who’s running each work group? Do we need bylaws? Do we have a certain time to meet? Are there agreements within the coalition that we need to establish? Or if you’re looking in a different phase, they can look at, how are we gonna sustain this effort? What’s our funding situation look like? So they really do lay it out almost not actually insulting, but for some people it’s like, wow, this almost seems redundant, but it really ensures that

Every T is crossed and every I is dotted.

Nice. Okay. No, now you got me all intrigued. Can you take us through the five phases?

Absolutely. So phase one is really just getting started. And that’s exactly what they call it. So let’s say a community has a prevention specials or maybe doesn’t, but they just want to make a change. They don’t know where to start. So they look into, do we need to hire a coordinator? Do we have somebody that can take on kind of the lead role of getting this started? And so in phase one is where they hire a coordinator or somebody hires a coordinator within the community and starts getting them first on the overall framework of communities that care. So that’s phase one. Phase two is getting organized. And so that really is where stakeholders within the community are introduced to the framework. We have what’s called a key leader orientation, letting people know that, you hey, this is going on. We would love your involvement.

Maybe they don’t have the involvement to be active coalition members, but they want to be in the know. We still give them an orientation of what this is going to look like. And then after that, we find active coalition members in that phase two, where we do then give them an orientation. call it community board orientation, where we go over the prevention science, what risk factors and protective factors mean, get them confident on the framework itself and what it does for our community.

And then within that, a vision as a coalition, go through all those kind nitty gritty things as far as what a coalition needs to establish to be functioning.

Okay, and that’s all part of step two. Phase two, yep. Place two, okay.

All right, ready for phase three?

Yeah, I’m taking notes. I know you’re great. You’re great at this. I don’t know how you retain all this information. So phase three is a really, really big one. And this is actually where our coalition currently is living is where it’s the time where you create what’s called a community profile. And it’s kind of two halves. The first half of that phase three of the creating the community profile is looking at the local data.

You specifically the prevention needs assessment. I think some other people might call it like a youth survey, but it’s a survey that’s given to a lot of schools across the country that it asks more of the why questions. There’s another survey called the youth risk behavior survey. And that gauge is what the what is like, what are the behaviors that they’re exemplifying? This asks the questions that will categorize it into those whys, which is the risk and protective factors.

And so these questions are weighted and scaled at ways that, you know, a biostatistician did, not me, but they created this great survey that a lot of counties take. And so we look at that local data and assess, okay, which risk factors are the highest here in our community that we should prioritize reducing? And so that’s kind of where that first half is. Okay, can we?

Can we get that? Can we use that survey? Like if someone’s like, I want the Y survey. Like we, we do the YRBS, right? and we know the what, is there something, what’s the Y survey called or how do get that?

So in our state, in a lot of states, it’s called the Prevention Needs Assessment, PNA. As far as what it looks like in each state, I really could not tell you. I think a lot of states are doing it though. They might not even know it. We talked to our schools about it they’re like, yeah, I didn’t really even realize we’re giving this to the kids. It just kind of gets trickle down effect.

People overlook what’s going on, because there’s so many surveys, there’s so many.

Right, wouldn’t that be the dream? You just find out, my school’s already taking that. Woohoo!

I know, yeah, yeah. So I’m not helpful as far as whether how to get that, but the communities that care center would 100 % know how to answer that.

Okay, that’s perfect. And it was the PNA, which stands for one more time. Can you say it for me Prevention.

Yeah, prevention needs assessment. Yeah. needs assessment. Okay, that’s cool. And that’s just one half of the community profile.

Correct, correct. So after we look at, what’s going on and what are the risk factors that are correlated with it? For instance, for our community, it’s not exactly a boast, but Gallatin County is one of the drunkest counties in the country, actually. And so we see that there’s a problem with alcohol and we’re seeing that in our kiddos and there’s a lot of directions that could go. So we wanted to figure out, okay, why? Like why are kids drinking so early or drinking so heavily, driving, et cetera. And we can look at those risk factors and see exactly why. For our community, we found that the perceived risk of drug use was a really prevalent risk factor. So something within our community is showing that kids are not perceiving alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs as a risk to themselves. So now we know kind of where to put our focus.

So now that we have that first half of information of the why that it’s happening, we want to go into the community and do what’s called a resource assessment. So just to ensure that we’re not being duplicative, we want to be supplemental to the community. We survey the community and call up organizations asking, hey, do you have any programs, practices, or policies that address perceived risk of drug use in kids?

And so then we get to figure out, okay, what is actively happening in our community to address these risk factors? And if they’re not, great, we have an opportunity. If they are, okay, how can we strengthen it? Is it reaching every demographic that we know or spanning the entire geographic region? All of those things are assessed within that second half of phase three.

Ooh, okay. That’s cool. All right, so one, two, three. All right, we’re on phase four, four dot ready to write.

Yes, we are. Phase four is pretty, it’s easy, but it’s not easy. So we have all of this information. Now we got to decide what are we going to do about it? ⁓ Are we going to choose to implement a program? Are we going to look at changing potential policy within the community or practices in general, changing attitudes or norms? What do we want to do and how are we going to do it? This is where we create the action plan.

So a lot of this is very comparable to health department community needs assessments and action plans, but we make it specifically for prevention of youth behavioral health problems.

Okay, very cool. So you decide what to do, you put together your action plans, which could include programs, policies, something like that, based on the information you got before through the needs assessments, the P &A, the local data.

Exactly. Yep. And then phase five, it’s last but not least because everything’s cyclical, as you know, in this work. It doesn’t just end, it never ends. So phase five is really implementing the action plan. So whatever it might be, if it’s implementing a program, great, this is where you do it. And then you evaluate what you’re doing. You make sure within this phase, not only are we going to, you provide some sort of action, but we’re gonna make sure it’s doing what we want it to. And we’re not gonna just, especially, we’ve been very careful when we work with the school systems, not to just throw something at them and say, good luck, hope everything works out, because there’s already so much on their plates. We wanna make sure that what we do provide to the community is working and is worth our time and effort.

Yeah, that’s so important. I mean, it’s gonna, and it’s gonna help you repeat the whole system when you, you need to make this better every single time and we’re saving more lives because you’re improving every time you go throughout the cycle, the phases.

Right, so whenever we do our evaluation, let’s say it wasn’t quite hitting the mark, know, people didn’t like it, or maybe it wasn’t sustainable in some reason. Great, let’s go back to the drawing board and figure out what we can do. Maybe it is working, awesome. Let’s see, let’s ensure we know how long this is gonna last. Is it truly sustainable? There’s actually some sustainability in funding workshops in that phase five to ensure that we don’t just, you know, have a flash program essentially where it’s like, that’s really cool. We only had time for it for one year. We want to make sure we’re giving a lasting impact within the county.

Yeah, I love that. And that’s something we say a lot at Vive 18 is like, for example, a keynote speaker is not a strategy. It’s a spark, right? Like you have to understand where each piece fits to do really great prevention work. Cause then you can see where all, like you mentioned, when you start developing your community partnerships and your coalition, like, all right, which ones do we need? Because we can all serve this different purpose and what other partners are we putting in place or programs in place to make sure that this is actual prevention and it is based on something we know that works. So I’m going to do my best to recap with my notes that I have from you and feel free to fill in any gaps for our listeners. But this is what I have so far. The five phases within this whole framework. And they’re called milestones and benchmarks. And the University of Washington is kind of heading up this research and they’re really involved in it. So phase one is when you get started. You might hire that prevention coordinator. You’ll get trained on the framework. So you kind of know what you’re doing and you feel comfortable moving to phase two. Phase two is when, thank you so much.

Phase two is you’re not, prevention is never done alone, right? We need to build community around those problems. So that’s what phase two is all about. You’re developing your coalition, which is work groups. You’re putting together your bylaws. You’re getting organized as a community to tackle this problem together. I also have that this is a great time to train and help your members be confident in what they’re what their prevention knowledge is and the plans that you’re going to make in the next couple steps. So they’re trained on risk and protective factors and you’re creating a vision as a group together. three. All right. All right. Phase three is the community profile and you’re gathering your local data and your needs assessment. And I love this. This is so helpful because when killing it. Yep.

Community Engagement and Data-Driven Decisions

When I bring up data on who’s using, if you don’t have the local data, you might miss the why data. Why are people using? And so making sure you have some of that survey data that shows the why. And you did mention the prevention needs assessment, the PNA. So maybe someone can Google if that’s done in their state and maybe get in contact with some partners if you want to do that in your schools or communities.

Definitely, and I do think in a couple of states it might actually originate as just being called the youth survey. So you could see those interchangeable there.

Okay, cool. So they might have a different name by it. Yeah. Okay. So that’s probably, that’s good to know because as prevention is, it’s local. Hey, what’s working in my community? What I need to know about my community. there’s, there is for that as well. I have a note. I don’t actually remember what this is about, but it says survey community. If they have resources strengthen.

Yeah, yeah, unfortunately and assessment. Does that just mean, strengthen the resources that you have?

Yes, so we’ll assess what resources are currently existing that address our risk factors and that’ll help with that next phase four by gathering that information of what’s going on currently.

Okay, very cool. And then that helps you with stage four, which is, hey, what are going to do? Let’s put together an action plan. And it could include anything from programs to policies to maybe even just going back to what are we missing in the first three? Does that actually ever happen, Shelby? Like, we want to decide what to do, but some information is missing.

Yeah, it definitely has. I’m trying to think of an example in Montana. There was one, I believe, where there was a program in one of the schools, but it wasn’t in all of them. So they wanted to expand it in that manner. Yeah.

Okay, cool. So you can identify, yeah, that’s so awesome. So nothing is missed in the model and that’s all the way up to five too is like, you have this plan now and let’s go implement it and let’s evaluate it so that we can do it all over again. Cause this is continual work, can always get better no matter how good we’re doing.

Yep. You took some incredible notes. Okay, awesome.

Thank you so much. Some of my friends know this, but I don’t brag about my memory. In fact, when I was in college, I had to take certain courses multiple times to pass them, even when I had a tutor. So I’m really big about notes and I’m really big about teaching. So for everyone listening, maybe it was a favor to you to hear it twice, but it was a favor me to teach it because as this guy, Jim Quick, I kind of read his stuff. He’s a brain coach. He says, when you teach it, you get to learn it twice. So there you go.

Yep, I get that. I feel that wholeheartedly. That’s why I love teaching, because it’s selfish, truly, for me to understand better.

Right? Shelby, I want to end with a question for you about your local work right now. What’s something that you’re really proud of that you and your program has done so far that might inspire some other people that they could do something similar? So whether it’s a program, event, anything you do within your framework that we could copy from you.

Hmm, gotta all the things I could brag about as far as my community goes. So we really just, I’ve only been in this position for a little over a year with all of that, so we’ve gone through about three phases within that year. And relatively, that’s pretty on the appropriate timeline that they expect.

That’s good. A lot of times it gets stuck in phase three because of lack of participation. Volunteerism is dropping across the nation for so many factors that I couldn’t even expound on. But we have had a consistent group of people that have just committed to the cause. And I am just so thankful for them. We’ve got

our sheriff’s department, we’ve got our health department, we have former teachers, we’ve got the county superintendent of schools on our board, we have ⁓ people that are therapists, I mean, it just goes, we just have community members, they’re like, I’m a mom and I care about my kids. So it’s just, it’s incredible the kinds of people on it and them consistently showing up whether they might not have something to give every single step of the way. It’s just driving the force forward. While I might be like the coordinator, they’re the whole heart of it. And I’m so thankful because a lot of communities just don’t have people consistently showing up. So I’m so proud of them.

Right. What do you think? That’s an incredible asset to have that committed group of individuals who are saying, yes, we’ll show up, we’ll help out and move this forward. Did they come on board before you were there and you kind of, you moved into the family or were you in charge of helping put them together?

Success Stories and Community Impact

Um, there was not this, the Gallatin Valley Communities That Care Coalition. There was one pre-COVID and of course it kind of dissolved because COVID was, you know, what it was. And so it, it, yeah, exactly. So it, it was kind of, there wasn’t a prevention coalition in the community. There are a couple, there are a couple of coalitions doing some things and I met with them.

Yeah. Yeah, kind of took everything when I was hired to ensure them like we’re not being competitive. We wanna make sure that we’re supplementing your efforts, but working together. And so I met all of these people just from them introducing me to each other, honestly. Like, hey, you should bring this person. You should talk to this person. And so we all just came together and they loved this framework because it trains them, it gets us all on the same page, and they really do love that it’s data-driven and action-oriented. It’s really great to say, want to make a difference, but we don’t know how. This will tell you exactly how, so you don’t have to overthink it.

Yeah. And that is really important because you could have the best system in the world, but if it’s so complicated that no one does it or it’s uninspiring because it’s this massive thing to tackle, then, I mean, the system isn’t really that helpful. So to have something that is palatable that you can train anyone on, that’s very, very important piece of the puzzle. So if people want to learn more about this framework and even though the work you’re doing in Gallatin, what resources can you leave us with?

So if you’re interested in this framework, you can go to communities that care net and It’ll show you everything they’re up to they have a really great core team of people that I I’m fortunate to be able to talk with Jacqueline and I I would highly refer her to anyone and everyone she’s the best so you can reach out to Jacqueline with communities that care or if you’re in the Gallatin County area, maybe your whole podcast, Jake, is just filled with Gallatin County listeners, and I don’t even know it, who knows? But if you’re in Gallatin County or in the area, gallatinvalleycommunitiesthatcare.org is our website where we’ll keep you up to date on what the heck we’re doing.

That is awesome. you might have a social media. Are you on Instagram? I’m one of the other ones.

I’m trying to be on Instagram. Gallatin Valley CTC. I’m doing my darndest, but I am a millennial and it shows. It shows that I am technologically savvy, but not as savvy as Gen Z. And I would love to learn from them. So, yeah.

I get that get that. Our co-founder, Tomas, he’s got the research. He’ll do it and he’ll get really great at it he, no duh, right? He runs our media program, thank the Lord. But his son has got that. I mean, he’s young and he grew up with his dad doing that stuff. I actually just hired him to help us with our social media.

Right? And it’s, you’re right, Lo. It’s it’s intuitive to him. He’s in touch with what’s going on and different trends and things like that that I myself ⁓ am not just really into. that’s okay too, because we don’t have to be interested in everything. But as long as we understand that prevention is better together and we can tag in some people to supplement our weaknesses, we’ll be good.

Yeah, part of my worry is that I know that social media is correlated with poor mental health. And so I’m like, am I contributing to the problem by putting everything on social media? I don’t know, but I wrestle with that often.

I, Shelby, you are speaking my language. had people on the show give me the real statistics about how it is like destroying mental health and what it does to our brain. And I came down to it to say, Hey, if I want to be a part of the solution, if this is the pipeline that’s ruining something, I at least want to be part of the positivity that’s coming from it can’t.

I can’t change all that stuff. I can’t make it go away. So at least I can be a positive force on it and use it if people are going there. And so I bit the bullet and I was like, all right, I’m going to invest, going to invest in it. And I’ll still advocate though for any laws that are passed or the schools not have it in there. Definitely will advocate to not have those things around as well. So.

Totally, totally. I love that. But yeah, we got to get our message out somehow. And it’s a great tool. It’s ultimately a great tool.

Yeah. Well, Shelby, this has been really, really awesome. Thank you for taking some time to teach us about communities that care. I learned a lot. know that our listeners now have a supplemental tool to go along with their prevention work that could hopefully benefit everyone that they work with. once again, Shelby, thank you for being on the show today.

Oh, thank you. It was truly a pleasure.

Awesome. And for everyone who’s listening, thank you for being a part of the prevention community. Remember that we’re better together. So anything you need, please reach out. Just to update on Vive 18 real quick, we have the crews, the Prevention Innovators crews coming up in April. We have our youth conference in December. If you’re looking to train those student leaders on mental health and prevention skills, not just knowledge, but skills, bring them to Phoenix when the weather’s nice. And then we do also have our online course in community, the Everything Youth Engagement course in community for youth advisors and pros who are directly leading prevention clubs for young people. So if you have anything that y’all need, reach out to us. We want to be a resource for the great work that you’re doing with your local data and all the great stuff that you have going on. So we will see everyone next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.