12/5/2007 2:20:00 PM Sustaining the Alliance Williams Alliance to become more visible in town
Posters for the Red Ribbon contest are displayed at the Williams Senior Center during the Nov. 29 Red Ribbon Awards Ceremony, in which a number of area youth were honored for their contributions. Over 200 entries were received as part of the contest.
Members of the Williams Alliance will become more visible in the coming months as staff and board members plan to visit with a number of local and county agencies throughout northern Arizona. Alliance members plan to meet with county leaders, justice officials and city of Williams personnel in order to spread their message and gain ideas for the Alliance's future, according to officials with the organization.
The Williams Alliance works to prevent drug, tobacco and alcohol use among youth in the Williams community by collaborating with a number of other organizations, such as the National Guard, the Williams Unified School District and many others. Recently the Alliance targeted Williams as a "hot spot" when they released a report on underage drinking in April of this year as part of the group's Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF-SIG) grant.
Alliance members are planning the upcoming meetings in order to determine ways to keep the organization going after the group's federal funding runs out in four years. Officials with the organization plan to submit a sustainability plan to the federal government by the end of the month. Brad Massey, prevention coordinator for the Williams Alliance, said the group is currently planning how they will pursue that plan.
"The sustainability is how the coalition would continue to function after these grants.
We're just collecting information on how this could be done. The idea is to talk to different members of the community - to let the community know more about the Alliance," said Massey. "Hopefully we'll get some information there from people who know people, who know people, that might have ideas or money or things that we're not thinking about."
Like the Williams Alliance, youth prevention organizations throughout Arizona are growing, according to Beth Britton, director of the Alliance.
"With the sustainability effort, I think that what we'll be doing is targeting key people, such as we'll probably be sitting down with county leaders, United Way, juvenile justice officials, city officials and asking them what ideas, in addition to our own Alliance members, about what they might see as a way to sustain prevention efforts in the Williams community. Some of the things that are being talked about at the Governor's level are taxation on some level, or some sort of tax or some funds that might support local coalitions. A year ago there were 11 coalitions in the state, now there are 22 coalitions."
Britton said the Governor's office was investigating ways to sustain local coalitions in the long term.
"As they do in other states, you have funneling of some funds to support minimal staff, then you still kept your coalitions, your alliances, that were helping with a lot of the supportive efforts. What I see is that we're spending a lot of money at the back end in terms of our justice system, our enforcement, and a lot of money on treatment. So, like education, if we can educate people, maybe we'll keep them out of the prisons. Well, if we can prevent what's going on, maybe we can keep some people out of the justice system. I think every dollar for prevention is a dollar well spent," Britton said.
The Alliance helps to support a number of different organizations in the community, including the Access and Tolerance Committee, the Family Task Team and the Child Abuse Prevention Council among others. Patricia Helgeson, youth specialist with the Alliance, helped start the local SADD (students against destructive decisions) chapter at Williams High School (WHS). WHS Teacher Mike Fleischman has since taken over the SADD group.
"We'll be working with them. They'll come to the Access and Tolerance meetings and so forth, but they're kind of going off," Britton said. "The coalition isn't supposed to be out there doing all of these things. The staff is supposed to help facilitate. It's just like with the SADD group, you facilitate getting it going and then it goes on its own and then you work on other things. We try to get as much education in the school as we can. The county health works with Project Alert and they bring in that program. We work with Big Brothers/Big Sisters. They do a mentoring program. We fund that program. We fund the city recreation programs, the open gym, out of our grant and we're funding some more recreation out of our SPF-SIG grant, we're funding craft night and family game night through Rose Newbold. Those are some of the things we support."
The Alliance also helped pay for a three-day camp in Prescott, with the help of the National Guard.
"The Alliance doesn't always come out looking like the organization that's doing anything, because we partner with so many other organizations that other organizations take the lead," Britton said. "Recently we've started working with the Sheriff's Department, we worked with Maine Consolidated two years ago and lost our contact person, but now they're back wanting to work with us and they participated in the Red Ribbon. We're working with the Guidance Center now; we just started a partnership with them."
