Celebrating Campus Prevention during National Prevention Week

NASPA joins its longtime partner, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), in kicking off National Prevention Week 2015! National Prevention Week celebrates the prevention work done across the nation, including prevention with college aged youth, a SAMHSA target population. This year, SAMHSA encourages participants to use the hashtag #ChoosePrevention in recognizing and celebrating prevention efforts.

For college and university prevention staff, this week offers a chance to celebrate and plan for future prevention successes for the upcoming year. One of the greatest resources in planning for prevention is the SAMSHA Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF). The SPF provides practitioners and administrators a model to form their strategic planning to be most successful. The seven components of the SPF are:

• Assessment
• Building Capacity
• Planning
• Implementation
• Evaluation
• Cultural Competence
• Sustainability

All student affairs practitioners can be involved in prevention efforts, because prevention work is about reducing risk factors and building protective factors. Building student social networks, encouraging alternatives, creating relationships with students: these are all protective factors, and are well within the wheelhouse of student affairs staff.participation in healthy

Remember that despite popular media portrayal, most college students are healthy. Our students make healthy and responsible decisions about alcohol and substances, and most students have positive or thriving mental health. We need to critically look at whether our prevention strategies are targeting only a segment of our population, or if we are trying to reach everyone on campus.

Targeting our entire campus populations is known as primary prevention. Primary prevention aims to reduce harms before they are experienced. Interventions that address the campus environment, build pro-social bystander behavior, provide education and information during pre-matriculation, and correct misperceptions in student norms all are forms of primary prevention. 

We encourage administrators to reach out to prevention practitioners on campus and offer them a show of support. Sometimes, direct service prevention staff can feel like Sisyphus, rolling prevention efforts until they almost look like they will be successful, only to then get flattened by a crisis or emerging new substance. But while Sisyphus was alone, prevention practitioners have the support of an entire team of student affairs professionals to encourage and support the work they do.

Celebrate successes, plan for the future, support each other, and #ChoosePrevention, because it makes a difference when do this right.