Statewide Initiatives and the Environmental Approach

Environmental Management

Most campus alcohol and other drug (AOD) programs include prevention, intervention, and treatment services designed to address individual students’ knowledge of the consequences of alcohol and other drug use, improve their skills in resisting such behavior, or address existing problematic use of or addition to alcohol or other drugs. Research shows, however, that campuses have had limited success when prevention efforts are limited to these traditional activities. The reason is simple: these activities are designed to prompt individual students to make different decisions about using alcohol and other drugs, but do not address the environment in which they make those decisions.

The field of public health recognizes that health-related behaviors are influenced by multiple factors: individual factors, peer factors, institutional factors, community factors, and public policies. Successful prevention programs address all of these factors in a comprehensive approach. For campuses, it is especially important to complement existing efforts by addressing the physical, social, economic, and legal environment in which students make decisions about AOD use, which can be accomplished through a mix of institutional, community, and public policy change.

The Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention (the Center) promotes the environmental management approach and has identified five specific factors in the campus environment as contributors to alcohol and other drug use. These environmental risk factors suggest five corresponding strategies for environmental change. Each of these sub-categories involves a wide range of possible strategic objectives.

Addressing Community Factors

The essence of the environmental management approach to alcohol and other drug abuse prevention is for college officials, working in conjunction with the local community, to change the campus and community environment that contributes to AOD problems. Such change can be brought about through an integrated combination of programs, policies, and public education campaigns. With the environmental management approach, there is a coordinated effort to change the campus and community environment in order to produce a large-scale impact on the entire campus population, including students, faculty, staff, and administrators.

Whatever students are told on campus about alcohol, if the surrounding community delivers a dissimilar "educational message" through low-price beer promotions, illegal sales to minors, lax law enforcement, and low alcohol excise taxes, students will continue to experience significant alcohol-related problems (Stewart, 1997). The same concern applies to other drug use. If the community has weak prevention programs, lax law enforcement, and inadequate drug treatment resources, then students will be facing an environment that invites problems with illicit drugs (Pentz, 1995). In short, student high-risk drinking and illicit drug use are not problems of colleges alone, but of the entire community, and it will take the entire community to solve them.

It is necessary, therefore, for campus and community officials to collaborate to rework the physical, social, legal, and economic environment that drives student alcohol and other drug use. Therefore, a campus community coalition should be established that should include community representatives and college officials among their membership. In effect, then, campus and local task forces should have overlapping directorates.

A chief focus of a campus and community coalition should be to curtail youth access to alcohol and to eliminate irresponsible alcohol sales and marketing practices by local bars, restaurants, and liquor outlets (Erenberg and Hacker, 1997). Community mobilization, involving a mix of civic, religious, and governmental agencies, is widely recognized as a key to successful prevention (Walter, 1997). Essential to making community-based programming work is the formation of coalitions and interagency linkages that lead to a coordinated approach, with adequate planning and a clear division of responsibilities among coalition members.

Statewide Initiatives

The ideal vehicle for promoting the formation of campus and community coalitions at the local level is a statewide prevention initiative, a concerted effort by institutions of higher education, state government officials, and community organizations in a state to change aspects of the campus and community environment that contribute to high-risk drinking and other drug use. While campus and community coalitions bring together an array of key partners locally, statewide initiatives foster collaboration among higher-level participants; in turn, their involvement may bring more attention and political credibility to the prevention efforts on the state level. Through a statewide initiative, college administrators, state officials, community coalitions to reduce underage drinking or “for drug free youth”, and other professional or trade associations (for chiefs of police or the hospitality industry, for example) can collaborate to influence public policy. This approach is especially effective in limiting availability, increasing enforcement, and restricting marketing and promotion.

Statewide initiatives involve two key processes: the creation and mobilization of campus and community coalitions to local action, and the collaboration of key stakeholders to advocate for state policy change. Given the individual nature of each state, there is no one recommended approach to starting and maintaining statewide initiatives. The climate, culture, and key partners involved will uniquely determine how initiatives are formed, their actions, their influence, and the environmental factors on which they focus. However, research and practice have shown us that a successful statewide initiative includes most of the following key elements:

Taken together, these elements can serve as a guide for implementing and sustaining initiatives designed to change the campus and community environment that contributes to high-risk drinking and other drug use by students. The application of these elements can be adapted to the timing, priorities, and structures that are most suitable for the needs and climate of individual states.

Benefits of statewide initiatives

Statewide initiatives as a prevention strategy provide a number of different benefits. First, when many schools in a state work together in a public way on the problem, political cover for schools that might be nervous about stepping to the forefront and dealing with the AOD problems aggressively is provided; individual schools are not singled out. Second, statewide initiatives can help bring positive media attention to student high-risk drinking, especially to the kinds of solutions that are available. Another reason for pursuing a statewide initiative is that, in some cases, resources can be made available. Funding sources, state government, state liquor control boards, and foundations are more likely to invest in a broader statewide strategy than to support individual schools. There is also an opportunity for campus and community teams from across a state to support one another as they grapple with the very difficult work of environmental change at the community level. Finally, there is also an opportunity for influencing state level policy.

Many of these benefits were experienced by the Ohio statewide initiative launched by Ohio Parents for Drug Free Youth (Ohio Parents) in 1996. Ohio Parents is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing leadership and fostering networks to promote safe and drug free communities throughout Ohio. Initially, 19 colleges united to approach the reduction of high-risk drinking using the environmental management approach. The Ohio College Initiative to Reduce High Risk Drinking has grown during its seven years to include 41 four-year public and private colleges and universities. The president of each institution has signed a letter of commitment to address high-risk drinking and to "encourage and support the collaboration of campus and community in approaching this issue." Funding from state and federal sources supports the initiative’s activities, which include meetings, trainings, and retreats for campus project directors and other change agents. Ohio Parents also conducts an annual campus survey and has found increases in the number of formal campus task forces and increased involvement of specific key stakeholders in campus and community prevention efforts. There have also been increases in the number of campuses adopting environmental strategies.

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