Celebrating 100 Episodes of Impact

Hey! Welcome to episode 100 of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. This is crazy. I’m in awe that this is 100 episodes. I felt like we just launched this. I guess it’s been a couple years. So this episode, here’s the plan. We’re gonna celebrate. We’re gonna celebrate where we’ve been. What’s happening to Vive 18 these days, and then I’m gonna give away up to $4,000 by the end of this episode. So stay tuned on how you can get a piece of that.

All right, so celebrating. It’s 100th episode, and last year, Vive 18 partnered with over 100 schools. Yeah, we brought our life-saving leadership.

Shortcuts versus skill sets, drug prevention message to over a hundred schools partnering with coalitions and schools all across the country. It was awesome. Also helped launch 25 new peer-led clubs. So students making a change in their community. Can’t get better than that. And then reached over 55,000 students. Yeah, that’s so cool.

Students across the country learning how to make friends have fun and feel good without using substances. Ugh, I love it. I love it. One of my favorites, the last celebration is at Vive 18, we were able to give away and donate up to $5,000 to youth prevention clubs and nonprofits. That’s awesome. My goal this next year and our team over at Vive 18, is to give away $10,000 to prevention nonprofits and professionals working in the field and to reach 300 schools. So yeah, without further ado, let’s jump into the episode so we can get you closer to those prizes that we’re going to be giving away because I don’t know, I’d be pumped for some prizes. All right, let’s see. Where’s my notes? All right, pulling this baby up.

So what’s happening with Vive 18? Number one, we are going to keep the podcast going. It’s super fun. We get to learn a ton. We’ve been hearing just great feedback that it’s how people start their week every Monday going to work. They pop in, you know, their earbuds or they’re listening into the car and they’re getting pumped for doing life changing work for that week. I love that.

Personally, for me, I love getting to learn from all of you, all the guests on the show, which are, know, drug prevention coalition professionals, people who work in schools and prevention, different experts, authors, coaches, speakers, people who are really diving deep into a certain topic. And of course, some of my favorite episodes are ones where we actually get to have students on the show, talking about their perspectives, talking about their youth prevention projects and all the great work that they’re doing. So we’re going to keep doing the podcast. Quick plug, if you want to be on the show, please let me know. The only caveat, what I look for is one, someone who’s in a field, in this field or in an adjacent field, and then someone who can share knowledge, skills, or strategies with us. Maybe even ideas, because one thing I’ve learned is that The power of prevention is really in each other. What can we learn from each other? What can we share that’s best practices? What can we share that’s evidence-based? What can we share that’s innovation and it hasn’t been done before, but it worked for you and maybe it’s gonna work for me too. So all of this to say, the podcast is going really well, we’re gonna keep doing it. Super stoked to have 100 episodes done, but now let’s get going for 200.

The other thing that’s happening, you might have known this if you’ve been on our website recently or if you’ve had a call with us and our team, is Vibe 18’s really grown over the last two years. It started with an idea in college to throw drug-free events so that every student would have a place to belong, make friends, have fun and feel good without sacrificing their friends or their future.

And it’s grown into this nationwide movement where we’re speaking in schools all across the country. We’re sharing prevention and life-saving leadership. We’re empowering students to become the solution, but it’s more of a partnership than a one-and-done speaking engagement. It is a partnership with the community, with our amazing organizations that we work with. And it’s asking the question, how can we equip more students to become involved in prevention, how can we build up their leadership capacity through trainings, resources, conferences, connections, whatever that is, because we know that building resilient drug-free students is best done by resilient drug-free students. It’s peer-to-peer work. So at Vive 18, our main mission is to get more students involved in this field.

So you’re going to see more peple on the team. That means if you haven’t already, you’ll probably meet Nicholas, who’s on our outreach team. Man, that guy is so cool. If you haven’t met Nicholas, this guy’s a walking miracle. He’s 18 months sober and just, gosh, if you get to talk to this guy, he’s just excited about life and what Vive 18 is doing because he used to be homeless.

He’s lost his friends to fentanyl and other drugs. And honestly, the fact that he’s living right now is kind of a miracle. And he’s just a really, really cool part of our team. If you’re working in the Western States, then Nicholas is your guy for outreach. If you’re on the East side of the country, Zion or Z, Zion Givens.

He’s our guy. He’s not only on our outreach team, he’s also our mental health and prevention speaker, showing students that it’s okay and even brave to ask for help. That we don’t have to wear a mask or pretend that everything’s okay. We can be authentic. We can ask for help and that’s really strong. Man, if you’ve met him, you know how awesome he is too. And if you’re in the middle of the country, you’re gonna meet Ciara.

Ciara is new on our outreach team. We have a real passion for what we’re doing and is our go-to person for outreach in all basically like the middle part of the country in those states. So that’s new for Vive 18 is that we have an outreach team. The other thing is we’ve got some incredible speakers. It’s not just me and Tomas anymore.

If you’ve had me, you know I do life-saving leadership, helping launch and grow student clubs and peer-led clubs, empowering students to be part of the solution. If you’ve had Tomas, you know he’s the restorative speaker who is connecting with students, showing them that your life’s not done. It can change whenever you decide it to. And yeah, I love his message of be, do, and have more in your life. And I’m really proud to have him on the team because if you’ve ever had to reinvent yourself, you know how messy it is. You know how difficult it is to do something like that. And Tomas is not resting on what he’s done in the past. Like this dude could be like, Hey, listen, I’ve been named the number one speaker in like all the state of Arizona. And I’ve spoken to like tens of thousands of students and won these awards. But he’s saying, no, I wanna keep up with prevention science and where it’s moving. And if even if that means changing my approach and always learning and adapting, that’s the kind of person I wanna be. So I’ll say this, if you’ve had Tomas in the past, then you haven’t had Tomas because Tomas is changing and evolving his presentation to stay current with prevention science and what’s working with best practices. So.

Super proud of him Tomas Baraza Doing the restorative myself Jake white doing life-saving leadership Zion Givens doing mental health and prevention and then we have Tom Coverley who’s Doing self-worth and prevention and if you haven’t met him dang this guy is so cool. So he’s actually based out of Florida and This dude is an illusionist a comedian he puts on these shows. He’s even being booked out on cruise ships to do entertainment. But his background is he’s been doing suicide prevention and bullying prevention for decades in schools. The coolest guy to hang out with, to talk to. He loves working with students and it’s just, man, this guy’s incredible. So he is doing with us, Self-Worth and Prevention, combining his illusionist comedian show and then showing students to break the illusions that drugs, vaping, all these things, all the illusions that are put out and what people want us to believe or what media wants us to believe in these companies, what’s the illusion and what’s the reality? And it’s really powerful.

I’m really pumped that our speaking team is growing. If you’ve had any of us or even Trevor Tripp, who’s based out of California and is being sent around the country to do work with us as well. I’ll just say this, if you hadn’t have Vive 18 lately, you haven’t seen Vive 18. There’s so much more to experience and it’s leading to some really cool partnerships. I was just out in Oregon. I just got back yesterday and we leave for Florida tomorrow.

But our partner was talking with us saying, hey, we basically want to have you the next three years for our eighth grade program moving into high school. Excuse me, moving into high school. Because we want students to know that you don’t have to use drugs to fit in or to make friends and have fun, and that they don’t need to change, but they can be the leaders.

And we want to book you for the next three years because we want to see a full cycle of students get this information and help build a new culture. And it got me excited because I’m realizing a lot of our partners are this way now. That they’re not viewing this as a one and done experience expecting life to change from a one hour assembly, which we know is not best practices.

They’re saying, hey, we have a prevention plan. We’re looking five, 10 years out and we want you to be a part of it. And to me, this gets really exciting because that’s the way prevention should work. None of us is designed to do all of this ourselves. Like how ridiculous would it be if like your band director was like, all right, yeah, now everybody switched clarinets, you go take a trombone, this person you take a drum, this person you go take, you can take the strings. It would be terrible. It would be so bad. We’re meant to do certain work and partner up with others who do other work really, really well. And it’s been really cool to see the fruit of that. All the clubs that are being started, all the students that are getting involved and the initiatives that are happening because we’re pushing towards students leading the way.

We’re pushing towards sustainability and best practices, and we’re doing it together. I love it. All right, so you’re going to see some new speakers, new outreach team.

The other thing that you’re gonna see is, and this started a couple years ago, is Vive 18 is really investing into building our conference program. And here’s why well, just like we teach in our free youth launch bootcamp is part of giving students a real experience where they can build skills and build self-efficacy, leadership skills, public speaking skills, is we can’t just textbook it to them. We’ve got to give them opportunities to learn and then practice these things. So two years ago, we launched the very first Vive 18 Youth Leadership Conference. Students, came to it to learn public speaking skills, how to plan drug free events, how to create videos and PSAs and social media content. And then they got a chance to practice all of those things during the conference that day. We took in feedback and did the conference the next year.

And the next year we did it over two days. That was part of the feedback. We wanted it to be split up into multiple days. We wanted more time with each other and a lot of people traveled to come there. So the next year it grew a lot. So we had people from eight different states show up, had the conference, same format, but over two days and had more connections, more workshops, more learning opportunities. And for me, I’ll tell you this upfront, like it was not the perfect conference. I made some crucial mistakes you know, but we all learned from it. And after the conference, we got a call from two different statewide health departments saying, Hey, our group just got back from your conference. I don’t know what y’all did, but we need to have, we need to either send more students there next year or have y’all do this in our state. And so it got us thinking like, of the people who were there, we either got the response of, we need to send more students or we need to do this over here, that made me think about where we’re going as an organization. And when we think about sustainability and giving everyone access to this, I see the future of Vive 18 is having regional conferences. And so this year, one of the big changes is our winter conference we’re going to be moving to a two, a model of hopefully two per year. But just this year, we’re going to take that winter conference, same dates, first weekend in December, and we’re going to try it in a new location. So an incredible partner has stepped up to basically host our conference at a resort so that we can house more people, have it all in one location. There’s probably, there’s going to be pools and maybe even like little water park. There’s going to be area for us to do all our programming. And if you’ve been to the Vive 18 conference, you know, it was important to us to have inside and outside programming, um, and do all the great things that we, did last year, but build it out more this year and add a third day. So it’s going to be awesome. And if you work with us, you know, affordability is really important.

We are keeping it 150 or below for pricing, 150 or below for a three-day conference. You’re going to get all your food during the conference. You won’t have to go outside for it. All that good stuff, all the contents there, all the activities. And just like last year, we’re going to be giving away money for you to take home and implement your projects. Your students are going to get to go in the prevention shark tank and compete and share everything they just learned in the conference, get to practice, and then come home with a project, maybe even some money to do that. And we’re doubling the amount of money that we’re giving away during this conference. yeah, everything you put in, you might even just get all of it back for this stuff, but we’re really, really excited for that. The other thing is you might have heard rumors about a Vive 18 prevention cruise.

Yeah, you heard that right. A conference on a cruise ship. And here’s the deal. This is not like a fake conference just so that we can all take a cruise together. Like, I will just, hey, if you guys want to go on a cruise, we can just do that together. But this conference is providing over 20 credits, right? CEU or CEH credits. This is the real deal. We’ll have time for learning on the ship.

We’ll also have time, a lot of time for networking with each other. And this is the reason why we’re doing this. Number one, it’s going to cut the cost for you to attend an incredible conference, most likely in half. Because you’re lodging and your food is included. This is part of the experience. So if you didn’t know, if you’ve never been on a cruise, it’s very, very affordable. So we’re buying the block of rooms to basically, a room is going to be like $1,200. And that’s two people rooming for a week, getting fed for a week, having all the activities for a week. And then you have a small conference fee. that’s imagine that’s $600 per person for lodging for a week and food. That’s unheard of. So we’re doing this. We actually picked the date. April, I should say we’ve picked the month.

April 2026 is when we’ll be leaving Miami for this first of its kind drug prevention conference on a cruise ship. And it’s not for youth. This one is for adults only. That’s y’all probably listening to this podcast for development. And we’re leaning on all of you for the content too. This is not an agenda driven, like this isn’t a Vive 18’s agenda conference.

You are choosing the sessions. You are choosing what you wanna see, hear, learn about. In fact, if you’ve been on our newsletter, you’ve already helped us pick what you want. So we’re going off of everything that you say you need, and we’re building a conference around that. So it’s gonna be incredible, super pumped for that. So if you’ve heard those rumors, they are true, mark your calendars, April, 2026 the last two things that have been happening, our toolkit, it’s got 18 prevention activities that align with 90 % of social emotional learning competencies, 60 % of the national counselor standards. and it’s been compared to, it’s basically like people have been saying, Hey, it’s like life skills, basically, right? It’s a holistic program. It’s building up protect protective factors. It just feels very current. so that program’s going really well.

We’ve got some new partners implemented and we’re continuing to grow data. That’s another thing that myself, I’m just not, that’s not the way my brain works, right? Like I’m the party guy. I’m the fun youth involvement guy. So data and analytics is not the way my brain works. So I brought on some partners to help us develop that part of the business. And we’re gathering data about our conferences, about what data we can gather on how well we build youth programs and get youth involved in this work so that it’ll be easier to find funding for all of our partners like yourselves. But the toolkit’s one of the things we already have data showing it’s working, and it’s building protective factors. Helping students set boundaries, build confidence, refusal skills, defining their values and morals, like all these protective factors that it’s boosting is already documented. So that’s pretty cool. And the last thing is we’re really diving into our free resources. So over the last couple of years, might have been through our, you might’ve seen our student guide to thrive in high school without drugs and alcohol.

You might’ve been given the five ways to talk to your kids about substances. Maybe you’ve even gotten our tool on how to grow your youth presence in your coalition but we actually built one this year. It’s a free video course on how to launch and grow a youth prevention club. So it’s called the Youth Launch Bootcamp. And that’s been pretty cool. That’s been valuable for people. So we’re continuing to invest in those kinds of things and see, hey, what value can we provide people for free that the industry needs? And we can have enough of it that’s out there so that it doesn’t have to be us implementing it.

It’s scalable, anyone can do it, and we want to get you that so you can start growing your group and we can make sure that what we’re providing is of really high value still. And then for our clients who work with us, this has been some cool things in development is now we have parent videos. So anytime we go out to speak or train or launch new prevention clubs, the gap of getting parents involved is a little bit easier. You’ve probably tried this, right? Like you’ve tried to get adults to show up to stuff and it’s so frustrating. We’ve seen that and we’ve responded. So now anytime you work with Vive 18, you will get five prevention videos in English and in Spanish geared towards parents and engaging them in your work getting them up to date on the message, how to talk to their kids about substance use, how to know what to look for, what topics to go into, how to start that conversation, what to look out for, all that good stuff. It’s broken up and even explaining, hey, since 518 is coming to you, here’s what they’re about, here’s what they’re talking about, here’s what they’re not talking about. So those have been super helpful in English and in Spanish.

We provide discussion guides. So for anybody that brings us, are having that follow-up materials where you can continue the conversation afterwards, debrief with the students or your peer led club, whatever that is. And then also we have an advisor guide. And I’m super proud of this one. It’s basically if you were to, if we start a club together and then you’re like, Hey, what now?

What’s the plan? How do I lead this group? We have a course where it can lead you through your first project and then what to do after so that you can start the club and not have to be stuck or think what now. Like we’re giving you the exact next steps so that you could tap in. Maybe it’s you doing the club, but maybe you have another volunteer doing it. And they’re not a prevention pro. They don’t know all these practices you can still leverage them and get them to volunteer so that they can help out. So those are the big, big things. Now let’s do some giveaways. right, once again, we want to give away $10,000 this year and we need your help giving this money away. So here’s how you can get some of this. Get some of this. Here we go. If you have a student prevention club, and they want to be a guest on the Drug Prevention Power Hour, I would say bring them on in pairs or more. So either they’re a club and they want to come talk about something or be interviewed. I will pay them $50. It’s a half an hour episode and I’ll send a $50. So at your next meeting, you’re like, Grant Money doesn’t buy food or this event. Grant Money doesn’t cover this. $50.

I’ll send it to you right away. Right as we record the episode, y’all have that and you can use it. And some of you are like, all right, we can do this weekly. I’m gonna say you can do it once per semester, okay? Once per semester, so $100 total, and your students will get a cool opportunity, right? Like they’ll be the stars, they’ll get to practice their public speaking skills, they’ll have something to brag about. And it’s a novelty of being in your club, right hat you got this cool opportunity to be on a national podcast. That’d be pretty sweet. So if you want to schedule that, go to Vive18.com, contact us, put that in the line. Hey, I want to schedule my student leadership club to do a podcast with you. It could be a discussion-based where I’m just asking them questions about it. Or if they want to teach us something, maybe there’s a program you did that you’re like, hey, this was a really great program. And I think other people could benefit from doing it too.

They could take us through that. Another one, a $50 giveaway before we get to the $4,000 giveaway. The $50 giveaway, we actually do this every single month in our newsletter. So if you’re not getting the Vive 18 newsletter, you’re not in our ecosystem yet. So you could either go to vive18.com slash intro and fill out that form or just send us a message through 518.com and then you will get our monthly newsletter. By the way, you can opt out whenever you want. But if you wanna be on it, it literally is once a month and it’s really helpful. We’ve got a recap of our podcast episodes, a lessons, I give a monthly tip, where we’re going. So if you wanna know where we are and if you tag on a trip, you just save a bunch of money. We always give any travel savings that we do by block booking it’s called. So if we’re in an area and we stay there to serve more schools, we pass all the travel savings onto your organization so that you save money. We don’t, right? We’re giving those all to you. So this newsletter this month, the thing you can do to enter to win for the $50 giveaway is either leave this podcast to review wherever you listen.

Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, whatever, leave a review. And then if you want two chances to win, go on our Facebook page at 518 and leave us a review if you’ve worked with us or if you enjoy our content or something like that. Like you have some sort of connection, which if you listen to this, sure, that’s a reason too. But that’s monthly if you’re on a newsletter. Now for the big bucks, $250 giveaway.

Anytime you share us with another school and they have a Vive 18 presenter come out there, we want to donate $250 to your youth prevention efforts. So I’m going to share with you how to do more of that. Like how actually can I share it easily without being salesy or weird, right? When it comes down to it, I think our, like you and I. Our efforts in prevention, it’s life-saving work. So I never feel salesy. would literally call anyone in the world and tell them about what we do because I’m so passionate about the change we’re making and the potential of saving lives. It’s like if you had a medicine that cured cancer before it even started, would you feel awkward calling people and telling them about it? No way. That’s what prevention is though.

You realize that, right? Like prevention is a cure before someone even gets anything. It’s the cure for addiction. It’s the cure for some kind of cancers that are more likely to happen when you drink or smoke or use different drugs. It’s the cure before it even starts. That’s, man, that’s prevention. It’s so powerful. So here are some ways you can do it.

If you want to share Vive 18 with another school, just go to our website, vive18.com. That’s V as in Victor, V-I-V as in Victor, so vive18.com. Go to the bottom or the contact page and fill out that form and in the message just say, please send me the Vive 18 share email. And we will send you an email that you can edit or do whatever you want with, but it’s got everything you need. You could literally just forward that to your friends saying, hey, I thought of you, this program’s pretty cool. Or put whatever you want on it if you work with us and want to share. But anytime you share that, if they book, we are going to send $250 your way. Because here’s the thing, we have to spend money on marketing. It’s worth it for us to market because we’re giving life-saving information, life-saving skills to students. We spend a ton of money on marketing.

So we’d rather give that money to you than to, let’s say, another company that is just a marketing channel. We wanna give it to our partners. There’s other ways, all right? So if you wanna win tickets to our Vive 18 Youth Leadership Conference. So this conference is to build skills for mental health and substance use prevention. These are worth $150 each and we’re going to be giving away plenty of these.

Also, if you come to the conference, we have our prevention shark tank where we give away up to $2,500 to groups. And then we also are giving away a Vive 18 speaking package. So our bronze package is valued at $3,900. It includes up to three presentations in your community, whether it’s at one school or three schools, it doesn’t matter. If we can fit it in one day, we’ll do up to three.

It includes all travel, so you don’t pay for that. It includes our parent videos and the follow-up activity and discussion guide if you want that as well. So all of that is just $3,900 and we’re just gonna give one away for free. How you get that? Any of these, the conference tickets or the bronze speaking package. And you know what? I’ll throw in some of the cruise tickets as well. So you’ll just have to pay lodging, but you won’t have to pay for your ticket to the actual conference, I’ll pay for that for you. We’ll throw in a couple of those too. So if you want to win those, just go to vive18.com, use the contact form on the contact page, and then tell us you want the Vive 18 share email to send out. When you send it out, just cc vive18 on it so that we know that you sent it out.

And if you send it out to at least five friends at schools or different coalitions, just to make them aware of what we do, that’s five chances at winning. So everyone that you send it to is a chance. And then we’re going to raffle them all up and we’ll be giving away all those prizes coming up. So just to recap, on the celebration 100th episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour, we’re giving away $50. Anytime your students want to be a guest on the show, we’re going to donate 50 bucks to their prevention club. We have our monthly giveaway on the newsletter. If you you’re contact us on our website, you’ll be on the newsletter. This month is leaving a review on this podcast or on our Facebook page. Two hundred fifty dollars when you share us with another school and they work with us. So that and anyone you share with anyone you share with, even if they don’t work with us.

You’re just sharing with us because you know that they could use our life-saving information. It could be a great partnership. You’re going to be entered to win any time you share. Just make sure you CC us. the person to CC is info at vive18.com. info at vive18.com. CC that email. And that is one entrance into the competition to win our Youth Leadership Conference tickets this bronze speaking package and the prevention crews for professionals. Getting those 20 credit hours and some incredible networking with your peers. Because we’re stuck on a ship together. Sometimes we’ll be stuck on a beautiful island together. You better believe we’re going to make new friends and share new ideas. All right, y’all, that’s enough. I could talk forever about this. I could talk forever with you. So we’ll leave it there.

I’m super excited. Thank you for doing this work that you’re doing. Thank you for partnering with us and being a part of the family over here at Vive 18. We will see you next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.