Every July, coalition leaders, prevention specialists, and youth advocates from across the country pack their bags for Institut de formation de mi-année du CADCA. And every year, they leave with more than a conference tote bag. They leave with tools they can put to use immediately.
Last summer in Nashville, that played out in two very different rooms.
In one room, Counter Tools walked coalitions through how to conduct store assessments in alcohol outlets, fieldwork where volunteers visit local retailers and document how alcohol is priced, placed, and promoted. Through their Retail Alcohol Data Collaborative, 31 coalitions across 15 states visited 2,368 stores and came back with the kind of evidence that can be used to change policy. Counties that had completed a store assessment were more than six times as likely to get a point-of-sale policy adopted than those who hadn’t. That’s a tool you can bring home and use to make your case to local lawmakers.
In another room down the hall, seven teenagers stood in front of a packed audience and talked about the prevention projects they’d spent a year building. Annie Gao walked attendees through how she ran naloxone training sessions for more than 120 students in California, a state where fentanyl has claimed over 6,000 lives in the past decade. Aidan Hayes described the months of advocacy it took to get his Washington school district to replace suspension with education, a policy change now reaching more than 3,000 students. Shloka Karia talked about turning a punitive vaping policy in Pennsylvania into a prevention program, and about a mindfulness corner that two-thirds of her 4,000-student school ended up using. These are Voices of Youth participants, part of a nine-month program developed by CADCA together with HOSA Future Health Professionals, with sponsoring support from SAMHSA. Their stories and projects are why CADCA has built its conference around youth leadership and youth training opportunities.
That’s the magic of the conference. You can attend sessions with youth leaders proving what’s possible, or practitioners handing you the methodology to do it yourself. The training sessions are designed to be hands-on and engaging, with an emphasis on practical, evidence-based strategies that attendees can adapt to their own communities as soon as they return home.
This year marks 25 years of convening the prevention field at CADCA’s Mid-Year Training Institute, running July 12-16 in Orlando. For the first time, it’s co-located with the inaugural Drug Enforcement Administration Fentanyl Free America Summit, meaning the week’s lineup goes even further, with federal partners and national experts joining the same conversation. You’ll walk away with strategies, data, and connections to people doing the same work in communities just like yours.
