Prevention Summits

History

Since the 1980s, the prevention community in Washington state has gathered each year to reflect on past successes, learn new strategies and network with one  another to prevent drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse as well other destructive behaviors.

In Fall 2008, the Washington State Attorney General’s Office provided a $100,000 grant from a  prescription drug settlement to help expand the highly successful Annual Washington State Prevention Summit, specifically enhancing the youth track.

At the 2008 Fall Summit, youth explored relevant problems facing their peers and learned tools to help them address these problems in their schools and communities with the expectation these youth groups would return in the spring to showcase their work.

In Spring 2009, the Attorney General’s Office and the state Department of Social and Health Services Division of Behavioral Health and Recovery (formerly Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse) hosted the first Spring Prevention Youth Forum to recognize the hard work of youth groups all across our state—whether they developed their own program from scratch or simply implemented an established project at their school. The Forum was funded through another $100,000 grant from the Attorney General’s Office cy pres grant account.

The goals were threefold:

• Recognize and reward students and advisors who worked to make a difference in our schools and communities.
• Give students the learning opportunity to share their projects, compete to be recognized in various categories and receive fun prizes.
• Encourage sustainability by building on the success of existing student projects, recording the lessons learned and other details about these projects, and sharing with others developing projects in the future.

Since then, the Attorney General’s Office has provided several more grants to DBHR to fund youth participation in the 2009-11 Fall Prevention Summit and to fully fund the 2010-12 Spring Summit.

We hope this work helps encourage youth to help prevent underage drinking, prescription drug abuse and other destructive decisions by empowering them to continue working in their schools and communities to help everyone make healthy choices.

Together we’re making a difference!