Connected Communities Helps Coalition Develop Strategies and Partnerships

The ease and relatively low cost of virtual interaction through social media allows people the opportunity to navigate and communicate with each other beyond the traditional boundaries of face-to-face communication. Connected Communities, CADCA's peer-to-peer social network, provides coalitions with a valuable tool to reach out to different sectors of the community and collaborate with peers.

Through this network, coalitions, such as the Healthy Communities Coalition of Lyon and Storey (HCC) in Nevada, are finding new ways to share information and develop partnerships to address problems in their communities.

According to Quest Lakes, Task Force Facilitator for HCC, Connected Communities enabled her to reach coalition and prevention specialists from across the country and learn how to apply their experiences and evidence-based strategies to work in her community. Working with a small staff and serving a rural community, Lakes’ social media presence plays an important role in facilitating communication between the coalition, community and other regional and national organizations.

“The advantage of using sites like Connected Communities is that it’s so simple and anybody can do it,” Lakes said. “Because we have a small staff that covers counties, social media sites help us connect without the technological and financial barriers of traditional media sources.”

For Lakes, Connected Communities provides her coalition with another voice distinct from its work on other social media sites. While the HCC Facebook strategy takes a more local perspective and provides photos and news to people in Lyon and Storey Counties, Connected Communities gives Lakes the opportunity to lend her voice to a national stage.

By searching Forum and Group discussions on Connected Communities, Lakes learned about how to best implement a number of marketing campaigns to address social host issues and prescription drug abuse. Through Connected Communities she was able to gather information about how to conduct effective sticker shock campaigns and community meetings with parents about social host ordinances and the risks associated with facilitating underage drinking initiatives.

Lakes also first learned about prescription take back events from observing other Connected Communities members’ online activities and conversations. After e-mailing different members and commenting on their pages to gather information about their events, HCC partnered with law enforcement officials to coordinate two prescription drug take backs at senior centers throughout their counties. In addition, she learned from and provided information to other coalitions to develop collaborations with veterans and military families.

The site allowed her to not only better inform her coalition’s work, but also helped the coalition engage in a partnership with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help evaluate the website for its youth violence prevention initiative, Striving to Reduce Youth Violence Everywhere. Representatives from the CDC contacted Lakes based on her active Connected Communities profile and proposed an ongoing collaboration with her organization on best practices for creating a youth violence prevention action plan.

Join Connected Communities and engage in the conversation! And if you haven’t already “liked” CADCA on Facebook, you can do so now at: www.facebook.com/CADCA.

For more information about CADCA’s social network, contact Sue Stine at 1-800-54-CADCA, Ext. 260 or sstine@cadca.org.