Youth Led Town Hall Meeting on Underage Drinking Prevention
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Napa County is one of hundreds of communities nationwide that held a Town Hall Meeting on Underage Drinking Prevention in April 2008 to discuss and raise awareness about the issue of underage drinking. 25 of Napa’s teen-age youth organized, hosted and lead this major community event that had over 200 participants! |
Hosts of this meeting included:
• Violence Is Preventable Youth Team of the Leadership Academy Youth Leaders in Action (Leadership Academy)
• Catalyst Coalition
• V.O.I.C.E.S. (Voices Our Independent Choices for Emancipation Support)
• Napa County Office of Education
• Napa Valley Unified School District
• With sponsorship from the Federal Government’s Interagency Coordinating Committee for the Prevention of Underage Drinking
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Participants in the meeting included: |
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During our Town Hall Meeting, participants:
• Played a quiz game about facts on underage drinking
• Received information about the issue of under age drinking from manycommunity organizations that help prevent and reduce underage drinking
• Discussed their opinions and possible solutions to this issue in focus groups with both adults and youth See the results from this discussion (raw data)
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The Wall of Commitment Participants made commitments ranging from: "I commit to be the example" to "I will eat dinner with my family four times a week." |
Youth Project to Address Underage Drinking: 4th and 5th graders from McPherson Elementary will create storyboards about healthy choices for pre-teens that will be distributed to schools and families. One of these storyboards will be turned into a short film that will be aired on public access television in Napa.
| Listen to and read all about our Under Age Drinking Town Hall Meeting in the radio segment and newspaper article attached below! |
LAYLA on KVON 99.3 - 4/9/08
Napa Valley Register features the Town Hall Meeting for Underage Drinking Prevention
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| LAYLA - Leadership Academy: Youth Leaders in Action |
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| V.O.I.C.E.S. - Founding Members |
Youth Leaders
OTM’s first Napa initiative was the establishment of the V.O.I.C.E.S. foster youth emancipation center. Since opening its doors in 2005, V.O.I.C.E.S. has repeatedly demonstrated that foster youth are not only capable of providing vision and leadership for themselves, but they are often the best teachers of the older people who aim to serve and support them. Currently, over 150 youth participate in efforts to provide housing, employment, education, parenting, relationship and health services to themselves and their peers.
In 2007, OTM partnered with Napa Valley Unified School District to establish two Youth Leadership Academies in response to two urgent community needs: To acknowledge and address a growing leadership gap in Napa, as increasingly fewer students graduate from high school prepared to fill the organizational and institutional needs of Napa County; and to alter the consistently low level of academic success among a growing population of Latino students in Napa. fifty students from Valley Oak Continuation High School, Napa High School and Silverado Middle School are piloting the two academies, leading a process of design, implementation and evaluation.
What’s next? VOICES will continue providing technical assistance to California counties who wish to change their practices for service delivery. In addition VOICES will open a second Center in Northern California within the next year. Over the next three years OTM is planning to expand the Leadership Academies to 100 students each.
