Youth-community partnerships for adolescent alcohol prevention: “We can’t do it alone”

Abstract

Adolescent alcohol use proves to be a continued challenge for public health, given that approximately 35 % of the USA’s high school age youth used alcohol in the past 30 days. This book describes an innovative collective approach to create community transformational resilience, which we define here as the ability of a community collective group to work together to transform ecological factors in order to limit risk factors and to promote protective factors. A low-income ethnic enclave community transformed themselves from a low level of community readiness rooted in denial and tolerance of adolescent alcohol use to institutionalization of community-level prevention activities. Over an 8-year period, the South Tucson Prevention Coalition evolved from Phase 1, building youth leadership and critical consciousness through after-school programs to Phase 2, building a youth-community coalition to change alcohol norms and alcohol availability. South Tucson Prevention Coalition was successful in developing a functioning coalition whose participatory action research led to critical consciousness of the environmental context surrounding adolescent alcohol use which spurred collective action for change.