Southeast Missouri Behavioral Health has been awarded a new five-year grant to expand the services it offers to reduce substance misuse in a six-county region.
In September, “we will be ending our fifth year of a Partnership For Success Grant,” said Ryan Peabody, director of prevention and community education.
The newly-awarded grant “gives us the opportunity to expand the services that we have been offering to schools, organizations and families that have not been involved in this last cycle,” Peabody said.
Projected at a little more than $1.4 million in funding, the grant was awarded by SAMHSA (Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration), which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The Reducing Access and Increasing Skill-based Education (RAISE) project is a comprehensive prevention approach primarily targeting youth aged 12-18 and their families within Butler, Carter, Reynolds, Ripley, Stoddard and Wayne counties, according to a news release.
The project reportedly includes community-based strategies to reduce youth access to alcohol and prescription medications not prescribed to them and to build knowledge, skills and abilities in youth and parents to increase protective factors associated with reduced substance misuse.
“We will be introducing parenting and family education classes that help reduce substance abuse among youth,” Peabody said. “That’s something we’ve not done in the past.”
A large portion of the grant will be taking what Southeast Missouri Behavioral Health has “done in the past and expanding them to basically those who haven’t received our services before within the last five years,” Peabody said.
For example, over the last year, Peabody said, 40 groups have been doing Botvin LifeSkils classes.
Peabody said Botvin LifeSkils is an evidence-based education program for youth to “build up their skills, which will eventually lead to a (reduction) in substance abuse among them.”
With the new grant, “we are still looking at doing programming like that, but we are looking to find more schools and groups to be involved,” Peabody said.
Activities funded by this grant reportedly will include environmental and educational strategies to achieve its goal, including alcohol compliance checks, retailer education training, ID scanners for retailers, prescription lock boxes and medication disposal pouches available for community members, and skill-based training for parents and youth, including programs like Botvin LifeSkils, Mental Health First Aid, Guiding Good Choices and Generation Rx.