“A Conversation with Kendall and Ravnoor from Atlanta’s Suburbs”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Party talk, where we Empower Leaders in youth drug prevention. Today, I am on zoom with two new friends, Kendall and Ravnoor. And they are doing extraordinary things out in the Atlanta area, just north of Atlanta, one of the suburbs, and we’re going to talk prevention. So Ravnoor, Kendall, welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you for having us.

Hey, yeah, happy to be here. Thank you so much for having us.

“Passionate Paths: Kendall and Ravnoor Share Their Journeys into Youth Drug Prevention”

Of course. So let’s start off with a few. Let’s deep dive your intro a little bit. Tell us about, you know, be fun. Tell us how you got into prevention. And what you’re doing right now.

Ravnoor, uh you want me to kick it off?

Sure. sure!

Cool. Well, yeah, again, so happy to be here. So excited to be a part of this I am a podcast or so to be able to be on the other side of things is really exciting. And I know how much it helps me to hear from other coalition’s and other preventionists, what they’re doing and what’s working, and like hearing their passion behind it, because that truly does help drive my passion and what I’m doing. And so with that, you know, my name is Kendall McMichael, I actually grew up in the city that we’re serving. So we work in the city of Johns Creek, which is just north of Atlanta, about 30 minutes. And the passion that drove me to do prevention is that when I was growing up, I was the youngest of three, I’ve got two older brothers. And, you know, they went through some hard times in high school, and the organization that I get to work for, which is Pathways 2 Life, actually came alongside them, and helps them in a way where they were able to overcome what they were struggling and get the support and the connection that they needed from trusted adults to you know, get back in alignment with who they are and the goals that they want to achieve. And now they’re both doing amazing, awesome things. And so being a person that’s not in recovery, myself, being more of that family member that sees other family members going through a hard time, it really opened my eyes to how important this prevention work is, and how important it is to get in front of whatever might be going on to help keep it from getting worse later on down the line. And I’ve been able to witness firsthand how impactful that is. And so with that passion and drive, I went to the University of Georgia Go Dawgs. We’re gonna get them next year, you know, it’s gonna be alright. And I got a bachelor’s in public health, specifically in health promotion and behavior. And so I’m literally doing the dream job. Exactly what I studied in school exactly what I wanted to do, I’m doing right here, which is boots on the ground community work connecting with students, like myself, and like my brothers, trying to live out what I experienced through my brothers when they needed support and help. So that’s why I’m here and I love what I get to do.

Wow, that’s incredible. Thank you so much. That’s, that’s awesome. You’re being the person like you wish you had and your brothers had. That’s so powerful. And I can relate to that not in recovery myself, but saw it close by and wanted to make a difference. Thanks for sharing that Kendall. And Ravnoor let’s have you go give us your, your best intro and tell us all the details.

I first came into this internship into this coalition through a Kendall had posted this like flyer to invite interns in for the first year for and I saw it within another program that I was doing. And I was interested first because there’s not a lot of opportunities for like kids in our area, or in my age group to to look at how drugs and alcohol are actually affecting us like we learned about it in school, but it’s like, the things we learn in school are often very straightforward to one way and there’s very little like interaction or communication between us and who’s actually teaching it. And so that’s where that’s where my inspiration came from. That’s where, that’s why I wanted to do this. And so I interviewed with Kendall and I, I love the interview. It was my first interview at like in person interview. It was very I was nervous. Oh, that it was great. I really enjoyed talking to Kendall that day. And yeah, after that, we hit it off. I joined the intern internship and it’s been, it’s been great ever since.

Wow. And so you’re a senior right now. And when did you do the internship and what did they, what kind of things that they have you do? Well did kendall have you do.

“Successes and Growth in Substance Use Prevention Initiatives”

The internship was last Summer, I think I’m not wrong. And so in the beginning, we hadn’t. It was our first year and so we hadn’t had like everything set in stone Kendall gave us a lot of, like creative freedom with what we what exactly we wanted to do. And we chose, we chose two projects, essentially. The first one was setting up one Johns Creek, Instagram page and social media. And so one of the biggest things was that when Johns Creek didn’t have a lot of use involvement at the time, like it’s grown a lot since then, and, and so we started with the social media, which have a good amount of followers. Now, it’s very exciting. That so we would post like, think, every, every week, we would have at least one. And we had five interns. I’m not wrong. And so each one, each one of us would make a post a week, and we would post it and we decided what would be posting, like, sometimes we would post things that were like what we were doing at events and things like that. And other times, we were just posting statistics about drugs and alcohol or prevention. Yeah. And then the second project we chose to start was our big  Deterra project, which I was, I was kind of all of us had, like, so let me go back for a second Deterra is a safe way to dispose of medication, they come in like little pouches. And they’re completely biodegradable. And you can take it home and like pour your extra medications in for like expired medications, just medications that we don’t need, right. And bits of water in it, and you can dispose of it at home instead of flushing it down the toilet or like, I don’t know, leaving it in your cabinets so that someone else can get their hands on it right. And so one, Johns Creek had already had some of those in backstock, because they had partnered with, I think the state project earlier and they had gotten a whole bunch. And so we started thinking about how we can distribute those. And one of the biggest populations that we that I was assigned to was senior homes. Each one of our interns had a different group, like one of them was looking at like doctor’s offices, one was looking at like hospitals and things like that. And then like local businesses, like each one of us had our own sector, mine was senior homes, we figured that that was probably a good place, because there’s a lot of medications going around senior homes, right. And so we wanted to make sure that whatever medications they did have worked for them. And they the ones that they didn’t need anymore. They had a way of disposing. And so yeah, that was that was my part of the project.

That’s cool. I love that. So you got to do like hands-on advocacy and education through social media and build an audience so that you can continue to reach them. You also got to have a project out in the community to safely get rid of these, you know, pharmaceuticals and things like that. So they didn’t get into the wrong hands. That’s so cool. And so practical. And like, right on right on path with the work that you’re doing. And Kendall you had mentioned, like now she’s the youth representative for the whole coalition. So that’s pretty amazing. You must have done a pretty good job Ravnoor. Cool. Well, let’s talk a little bit more about any projects that y’all have going on right now that you’re really, really excited about, or that went really well. You know, within the last six months to a year, if somebody’s like, hey, what was your, your proudest moment or anything like that? I would love to hear any stories.

Yeah, for sure. Um, for me, you know, being youth and volunteer coordinator and seeing how our youth engagement program which is a One Johns Creek Internship Program, I’m seeing it just expand in so many awesome, amazing ways. So, as Ravnoor mentioned, we did our first year with five interns. They’re all from high schools in our area, we’ve got three major public high schools in our area. And so we had representation across those three public high schools. And we also had one person who was from a private high school as well. So it was really cool to get a diverse representation on our team. And basically we just train them and do project planning with them during the summer to get them ready. And then during the school year they implement their projects, which are the first cohort which Ravnoor was a part of. It was the social media and then the detailed project all at Ravnoor share her success with the detail project because she actually ended up spearheading that for in a lot of different ways. So I want her to be able to have her chance to share her wins with that. But for my wins as the facilitator of this internship program, we’re currently in the middle of our second cohort, we now have 10 interns. So we’ve doubled in size, which is awesome. And that’s actually allowed us to double the amount of projects we’ve been working on. And so we are continuing the detailed project. And we have a lot of wins that have come with that that I can share, along with Ravnoor. And then we have three other community projects that we’re working on as well. And then we’ve also continued to do this social media education and advocacy. So we’ve sort of created that as like a legacy project that all interns will continue to work on. Oh, yeah, it’s, it’s been incredible to see how much we’ve expanded. I think we went from maybe 10 Students interested in the first cohort where we ended up being able to take on five, or we had 30, plus students who applied for the second cohort, and were able to take on eight new interns. And we kept three of our original interns to be leaders like what Ravnoor talked about before. So really awesome, because like, at the end of the day, our coalition is doing youth substance use prevention, right. And so we don’t have youth on board, we ultimately, I believe we’re failing them. And so to have them on board to have them doing the community projects with our support from other stakeholders is really awesome. And it’s been cool to see how much that’s grown. It’s awesome. Yeah.

“Building a Successful Youth Internship Program: Insights and Strategies for Community Engagement in Substance Use Prevention”

Wow, I love that. Okay. And, Ravnoor, I definitely want to hear about the summation of the Deterra project before I get their handle. I’m imagining listening to this. And thinking, How do I get an intern team started? How, like, you started, you know, a year ago or two years ago, and you’ve already got some momentum, it seems like some of the benefits is like you’re embedded in the school, and in many schools, so that relationship is there, you have a system in place to have internships, and then the students are motivated to do a great job. And that’s something that, you know, they get a benefit from it, too, because it’s an internship. So do you have any quick tips? Or maybe things that were challenging at the beginning to get it started that you can share any quick tips with people?

Yeah, absolutely, I’d be happy to. To get started, I know, everyone’s communities can look a little bit different. So I’m gonna just give you all a quick picture of our community, and how our nonprofit organization works just to help clarify anything, because that is where we got a lot of our support and ideas from so Johns Creek is a affluent community, we just got named the number one city for health, innovation and wellness, based on our population size in the US. And so with that, not every single, like community member is affluent, but we do have a large proportion there. And so with that, our high schools and even our middle schools experience higher rates of pressure and competition, really boiling down to being the best across sports, academics, extracurriculars, because everyone’s vying for the same spots, and like the top colleges in the state, and also across the US. Having grown up in this city, I noticed that I shouldn’t say exactly because the pressure has definitely increased since I graduated high school, but I know what it feels like to experience that pressure, and to experience that competition. And I know that students are looking for those internship opportunities that can help them stand out. And so when my organization, pathways 2 life came to me, I had been recently hired. I’ve been with them about two years now and said, “Hey, we’re really wanting to get more student engagement.” We know this is important for prevention work, especially because our target audience is students. What do you think would work? What should we do? We brainstormed and we came up with an internship program. And we knew that that would be successful for us because we were growing our staff base at that time. When I came on board, I think we had about eight people’s staffing with organization now we’ve doubled that. So we definitely have the staff coordination behind us to help make this a really successful program. And on top of that, I work for one Johns Creek, which is Pathways 2 Life’s Community Coalition Initiative. And so we have funding from the drug free communities grant as well as the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act grant that also helps support all of the projects and initiatives that we started had in mind that we were wanting to work with on the students. And so with that, then once we decide, hey, let’s do an internship. Let’s figure it out. I think the main things I kept in mind was working with students from the get go. And for us, it was easier to get in front of students because pathways to life has another initiative where they provide education in the ninth grade health classes that are around prevention, mental health prevention and substance misuse prevention, you know, sort of that all encompassing type of curriculum. And so we are already able to get in front of students and get in front of classes to recruit for the original internship cohort. So recruitment was easy, we sent fliers out to all of our coordinators at the school, different admin, different teachers who we knew would help us, you know, recruit students to apply. For me, a big part of it was doing the interview process, I felt like that made it a little more official. And it also gives students a little bit of a professional opportunity to sort of get their feet wet with an interview. Because I know for me, interviews are always stressful, and always intimidating, no matter how many I’ve done. And I’ve done a lot by this point, right. And so to give them that in person opportunity, especially coming out of COVID, I felt like it was really helpful to sort of get to know them and give them that opportunity. Um, and then as far as the rest of it goes, I just look to other organizations in our area other coalition’s doing similar work, I went to a lot of like, webinars and trainings and things on like best practices for student development and student engagement in a sort of brought all that together to determine what the internship should look like. And the first thing that I realized is this cannot be an internship where we have them, staple papers, get coffee, and sort of just do the grunt work, right. That’s not the point. I always want it to be for them to do work, that they know is important for high schoolers, because they’re high schoolers in their schools. And so that all falls back to you know, local problems require local solutions. And I wanted them to be a part of the solutions because they’re seeing the problems. Yeah. So that’s really at the heart of it. I kept all that in mind as I developed it. And I wanted them to be part of developing a process like Rob Moore talked about, I didn’t throw them a project and say, make it happen. I didn’t make it such an ironclad program, but they just sort of checked their boxes and moved on. I wanted them part of every step of the planning process for everything that they wanted to accomplish.

“Navigating Academic Pressure: A Student’s Perspective on Stress, Competition, and Substance Use Prevention”

Yeah, exactly. Because then it’s a it’s a real experience. And it’s going to make a difference, because it’s from, from students. And I love what you said, like, you can’t just have them stapling papers. It’s like saying, Oh, I’m gonna build this incredible sports team, I’m gonna hire the best athletes. But then oh, you know what, you can be the water person, you can get this water, like, don’t utilize your best asset. So, Ravnoor, let’s move to you. I actually want to, actually want to continue on what Kendall said before we hear the rest of that story. Do with that culture of competition? In the schools? Like, is that something that you feel? And you’re like, oh, yeah, like it’s embedded. There’s a spirit of competition or like I high achievement? And what do you think, How does that fit in with with drug use, or prevention or mental health? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, yeah for sure. In our area, there’s a lot of competition, there’s a lot of really high performing, especially in academics and even in extracurriculars. All of the students in our area are very high performing. And so to get into top colleges and things like that, for us, especially in high school, like we we see in the future, but only so far in the future, we see, oh my god, I have to get into this college or that college, and it’ll be a disaster by dou and so at depending on the school, a lot of schools in our area, met Kendall mentioned that there’s three like big ones, right. And so each one of them obviously has their own population, but and each one has their own difficulties and thing, but it is definitely very competitive throughout all of them. And I do think that makes a difference in drug use, especially like drugs like Adderall. That’s a big thing with like, students taking it to like, stay focused and like, take a lot of the times they’ll take more than they need and things like that. And so the pressure is definitely there. Like at my school, I know that. Kids take an average of like taking less than, like, six or eight AP classes, depending on where you are at the school is like, you have to take at least six like six is like minimum. Wow. And so over the years, and I know plenty of kids who take like six in one year. Oh, and so it’s, it’s very hard. Yeah.

Wow. Okay, so is from maybe just from looking around to is like, you mentioned Adderall. Is there a sense of like, Oh, we’re working so hard so then we’re so stressed. And that’s an escape that we use, or like you said it was a focusing tool that they’re trying to use. And, yeah, as far as like, any other thoughts on. Yeah, when I do

I do think that like, with, with all this pressure also comes at some point, it has to release, like, some way or another, it will release. And so I know plenty of kids that, like, will, will just one day at the end of the semester, like in the during breaks and stuff, they they will get like terribly drunk or like, I know plenty of kids who vape. Vaping is a big thing and they’re like, oh, it relaxes me or whatever. But I feel like in in our community, the biggest thing is that we don’t see the issues and consequences with vaping, drinking, things like that. Immediately, we see it in like, in long term like we we are all smart enough to know that Oh, smoking can give you cancer. But since we don’t see it right then in there, it’s like, oh, but that would never happen to me. That’s a really big part of our mentality. And that’s where the issues come in.

Yeah, for sure. Okay, that’s, that’s super interesting. So then I imagine part of your prevention efforts for education are like, okay, healthy stress relief, healthy coping mechanisms, a spirit of competition is good. But it’s also like a balance of your mind and your body and rest and things like this. So that’s super interesting. Thank you for sharing that. And I think it’s, it’s one of those opportunities where it’s so good that you’re a part of the team, because you get a front row seat to not only the good things that students can do, and are doing mostly, you know, mostly making great choices, but then the ones that we can help, you know, like light candles family that needed help. And you get to be a part of being that that solution, you know, and being a good example, because it’s one thing for an adult like us to say it, and you’re like, well, that’s great, but you’re 30. So, like, I don’t have to worry about that for years, a decade, you know, but bringing it to exactly what you care about right now, which is well getting into school. That’s your number one priority or achievement, and aligning the goals of great health to those goals is super important. So that’s awesome. If you have any other thoughts on that, feel free to share otherwise, I’ve kept you all in suspense about the end of the Deterra story.

Oh, I don’t, I don’t have a lot more to say about that. I just, I think that definitely has to do of our like, the difference between us looking into the future like a decade away versus like the next like four years or it it’s also like, schools here like, depending on especially obviously there’s a wide range of students at every school, but a lot of them here are students that I will have students in my grade a handful at the very least who go to Ivy League’s who go to MIT, Stanford, things like that. And so to see that, hey, a kid in the same position as me and do that, why can’t I that’s like the biggest thing. And so that definitely builds up a lot of tension and a lot of competition, but that’s not to say we’re not like friendly with each other. I’ve definitely been to other schools in our area that like are way way too competitive. And it’s like, kind of scary to walk in but I think slowly we are trying to build a healthy balance. And yeah, I, I think little things like One Johns Creek and coalition building is helping.

Okay, that’s great. That’s awesome and such important work and Kendall sense you kind of knew maybe you knew the end of that story cause she kind of told us about the Deterra project and stuff. Yeah, maybe what question we should ask for,  what you were so impressed by. That went and happened to it and then Ravnoor. Are you can fill in the blanks if there’s anything or you can ask your Kendal.

“Fostering Student Leadership: The Power of Listening and Valuing Student Input in Coalition Building”

Oh, yeah, for sure. So yeah, I guess this is the time that I get to brag on Ravnoor because she’s a freaking rockstar. And we I mean We picked her to be our youth representative for a reason, right? It wasn’t, you know, draw name out. Like I had talked with my director, Elise Hensel. She was director of One Johns Creek. And we needed a new youth sector representative and Ravnoor was first on our list. And we are so excited that she accepted because all of our interns are amazing. I want to make sure that’s understood. But Ravnoor went above and beyond. So from the get go with the Deterra Project, she was helping lead and organize who of the intern group would work on what and she was helping follow up with people making sure things were happening. And then at the end of our like, training period, during the summer, we got to go to the CADCA midyear conference, which can cause community anti drug Coalitions of America. And we’re thankful to be a part of the organization because they’ve supported us so much. And during that time, like Ravnoor took it upon herself to be like, alright, we’re doing this to Deterra thing. We’ve got boxes and boxes of these Deterra bags that we want to get out into the community. How are we going to do that? She went and talked to Deterra representatives and got ideas from them. She talked to other CADCA co leaders, especially during like our training groups that we did with the other interns throughout that week conference, and really figured out how is this going to work and made a plan. And when I say I was disorientating, y’all I was facilitating like I did not give her a plan and asked her to fill in the gaps. She made the plan. And she figured out what would work and just like came to me for support suggestions, ideas and tips. And then we came back from that conference, the school year started and we were getting that project implemented. And she ended up spearheading it. We were able to connect with a local city based student volunteer group who Ravnoor was a part of. And so that gave us an additional, I believe, eight students to work on the Deterra project. And they made it their goal to get into five or more senior living homes to hand out the Deterra, but also talk about medication safety with the residents, and then also to get Deterra out in the community in general by going to community events and things like that. And so by the end of that period, we ended up handing out 1500 Deterra bags, which was amazing throughout the community. And they were able to go to I believe six senior living homes to do a fun activity with them, hand out the Deterra airbags and they just put together like a quick five minute presentation on medication safety. And that’s, that’s why we picked her to be our representative because she took that project on spearheaded it led it with like humility and confidence and capability. And we knew that we wanted to, you know, keep her on board with us to continue supporting our new round of interns and everything like that. Because she really showed us what students are capable of with just a little bit of support. So it was awesome. Wow,

Wow, that’s incredible. Well, I’ve loved, I loved hearing your story so far. And I feel like this episode flew by, I want to end with a final question. Just to be super helpful to anyone listening because they’re like, Okay, this is a dynamic duo. You’ve also got, you know, a team of 10 more people and students who are doing incredible work. So I’m going to start with you, Ravnoor, if you could give advice to another Kendall out there, maybe they, they’ve got some youth involved. And you know, they’re your advisor, helping you make a difference. What advice would you give to another person like that so that they could have a great experience for student leaders like yourself.

Honestly, the biggest thing that Kendall has done that really benefited us was really listened to what we had to say. Within the coalition, they have these like, their statements and like how to fix each what they identified the problems in the community. And then like how we would fix each problem, right? And so there was one there was like two days where we just sat down and read through all of them. And Kendall and Elise were both there. And they were willing to accept all the feedback that we were giving. And a lot of the times it feels like even when someone asks us to give feedback, it’s sometimes feel like feels like they’re listening, but it’s kind of going in one ear and out the other like they’re not really taking in what we have to say. But Kendall and Elise made sure that we knew that what we were saying mattered and what we were saying would actually help. And so I would say the biggest thing for a candle out there would be to make the interns feel like they’re actually doing something that will not only make us want to keep coming back. It’ll also make us feel like we’re in controls. And as a high schooler as a teenager, that is the biggest thing. Like, if I feel like I’m actually doing something, I’ll come back, I’ll put more effort into it. And so that was, for me. That’s the biggest.

Well said, All right, your turn Kendall. It says this is you talking to another one of yous out there. And the same, same question, what, how can we do this a little bit better?

“The Key to Successful Coalition Building”

Yeah. Thank you, Ravnoor. Also sweet like, that was the goal. To provide a safe space for them to speak up and for us to listen. And for me, listening isn’t taking notes during that meeting. And then, you know, leaving and doing whatever it’s taking notes, and then going and having a separate meeting with my director, Elise, being like, ”Okay, this is what we need to focus on.” What can we like, we already have our logic model, we have our Strategic Prevention Framework, we’ve got our seven strategies, we have all of these tools. And we’ve just been told that this is what we need to work on. And this is going to work. This is what’s going to work for our high school students right now. And so being willing to be flexible and to redirect when we get that feedback from students, to me, that’s what it means to listen and to make them feel heard is to take action from what they’re saying. And so with that, like all those tools that we have in that framework that we have, it’s so important to understand how useful they are, but not to stay so rigid to it, that you end up losing the opportunity to really engage students in a way that’s connecting with them and making things actionable and making things work. Because if we had left that logic model session that Rob nor talked about where we sort of presented them, where where we are, where we were at, and they provided us feedback on what would work and how we should tweak things and all that stuff. And we had left that session had been like, wow, that was great. And then didn’t follow up with them, didn’t tweak anything, didn’t take their feedback, like Ravnoor said, I think we would have lost all of them. Because we, you get one opportunity in front of high school students, to make them feel listened to and heard. And if you don’t follow up on what you promise with them, that’s when you can reduce them. And so to me, I think that’s the most important thing is to have your frameworks in place, develop your plan and process be prepared to guide them. But also to make sure that they’re steering the boat, you’re just reading the map alongside them. And that’s the best thing that you can do.

Oh, dang, that is so well said. Well, I can’t thank you both enough for doing this with me for being on the Podcast. This has been really, really fun. I appreciate it a lot.

Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. It was so awesome to be on here. Happy to share with you all.

Yeah, I had a great time. Thank you so much for listening to what I say.

Awesome. So for everyone out there listening to the Podcast, whether you’re on our YouTube channel, or Spotify, you know, Apple podcasts, wherever you choose to listen, if you enjoyed this, please do a favor, just leave a review that helps other people find us so that more people can be inspired to keep doing this amazing work. Because just like Kendall said, you know at the beginning of this episode, is maybe it’s something you needed to hear it was an idea. Or maybe it was just the inspiration to keep doing the great work that you’re doing, knowing that you’re not alone. And although this is challenging, it is absolutely worthwhile. And I’m so proud to be a part of this prevention family. Like that’s what it feels like. And so if we can make this family thrive and do better work together, I’m all about it. So that review is super helpful for us. Thank you. And if you have a friend who needs to hear this episode, please share it with them. And we will see you next Monday for another episode of Party Talk where We Empower Leaders and Youth Drug Prevention.