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\u201cThe Riverfront Coalition in the Historic City of Burlington, New Jersey was formed in 2017 and is focused on reducing youth use of alcohol and marijuana,\u201d said Coalition Coordinator Joseph Conlin<\/strong>. \u201cThe City is located on the Delaware River and is within 20 minutes of Camden and Philadelphia.\u00a0We are now in our second year of DFC funding.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of our biggest accomplishments this year was helping to plan and participate in a Play Streets event in July,\u201d said Conlin. \u201cThe coalition is part of a youth partnership that includes our faith-based leaders, school representatives, business and law enforcement members and other agencies in the local area who want to help out in the community. To get things started, the coalition\u2019s faith-based members participated in a local park and playground cleanup on Barclay Street, an area that has been abandoned by the community and has been known in the past for drug use and juvenile crime.\u00a0The park was cleaned, and all the equipment was painted and repaired. To celebrate the new clean playground, we helped organize the Play Streets event.\u00a0At this event on a hot July night, community members and coalition members came together to celebrate the safe community, play games, participate in arts and crafts, enjoy food and meet the local police.\u00a0The coalition provided t-shirts for all participants and had an information and registration table to recruit new members. It was amazing to see the community and the coalition members come together for such a wonderful evening.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the evening was drawing to a close the high school principal informed us that Burlington City High School had a 100% graduation rate for the first time in over 10 years,\u201d said Conlin. \u201cThe school has had one of the lowest graduation rates in the county in the past few years. This is an incredible result of much hard work from the school staff and reflects the efforts of our coalition youth peer leaders, who we have been meeting with at the high school on a monthly basis for just over a year. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur most recent student survey results show that the age of first use of alcohol has jumped a full year, from 13.3 years old in 2017 to 14.3 in 2019,\u201d said Conlin. \u201cWe have also learned that there has been a decrease in juvenile crime during that same time period.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is still much work to be done and our advice to other coalitions is to stay the course and continue to build capacity and bring community members to the table,\u201d said Conlin. \u201cWe are in the planning stages for a trip to the CADCA National Leadership Forum, and we highly recommend it for anyone who has never had the pleasure of attending.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThe Riverfront Coalition in the Historic City of Burlington, New Jersey was formed in 2017 and is focused on reducing<\/p>","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":13499,"template":"","resource_type":[281],"drug_specific_issues":[],"action_to_do":[],"class_list":["post-17228","resource","type-resource","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","resource_type-coalitions-online"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n