The
new director of Windham’s Be the
Influence (BTI) Coalition is no stranger to substance abuse prevention work. With
more than 15 years of experience in the field, Becky Ireland takes the reins to
manage the Drug Free Communities (DFC) Grant awarded to the coalition in
October.
Ireland
began her career as a coordinator for a DFC grantee in NH, which gave her the
foundation for DFC work. She is enthusiastic about the model, which brings many
different sectors of the community together to look at their local issues and
local solutions for those issues, she said. “It’s not a situation where you’ve
got some outside governmental agency telling you what your community needs,
it’s about your community partners coming together and talking about it,” she
said.
For
the past several years, Ireland has been a contractor for the state office of
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. In that position, she helped
develop programs to support communities across the state in addressing underage
drinking.
Ireland said she’s impressed with
the BTI leadership team and the work of the coalition. “It’s very strong in
that the members are really engaged and are really partners, which is the true
spirit of the grant program and the coalition,” said Ireland. “The staff people
are really just a resource to the community to help them bring the grant alive.”
The BTI Coalition members did a strong
community needs assessment, and after looking at root causes and factors that
might be contributing to substance abuse, came up with a comprehensive plan,
Ireland said. The overarching goal, she
said, is to establish and strengthen community collaboration in support of
local efforts to prevent youth substance use.
The coalition will strive to engage
members of the community from a variety of sectors in the coalition and its
activities as well as to increase community and coalition members’ awareness, knowledge
and skills around the root causes of teen substance abuse and evidence-based
prevention efforts. “We will do this through holding community forums, public
awareness and education campaigns, and training for community partners,” said
Ireland
BTI will also partner with community
members to address young people’s access and factors that support or contribute
to the issue, such as youth perceptions about community attitudes and norms.
Finally, according to Ireland, BTI
will train and support youth to be peer leaders, educators, and mentors to help
increase youth awareness about substance abuse prevention and the benefits of
making positive choices.
Ireland
started on December 4th. She said she’s excited by the energy that
surrounds the work at the local level. She’s beginning to see people engaged in
the work getting excited about the changes they are seeing, she said.
One
of the things that Ireland appreciates about working in the field of substance
abuse prevention is the collaboration she sees among coalitions across the
state. “They understand that substance abuse isn’t an issue that’s unique to
any one community,” she said.
Substance
abuse prevention work needs to be comprehensive and coordinated, she said, to
be sure all the issues are being addressed and there is consistent messaging
across communities who are being served by DFC Coalitions. “The coalitions in
the greater Portland area really have a great working relationship with each
other in terms of sharing resources and finding a way that they can have some
strength in numbers and efficiency by working together,” she said.
Her
role as director is to support what the community wants and needs, she said. “I’m
there to support them but at the end of the day it’s really going to be
community driven, and it’s about what they see as the need. I’m just available
as a staff person to provide some content expertise and to help make sure that
we’re moving the coalition forward in our action plan and doing all I can to
make sure the resources of the federal grant are used efficiently and
effectively,” she said.
