Programs & Services
Adolescent and Parent Education
Botvin Lifeskills Training
Learn more about Botvin Lifeskills Training at: www.lifeskillstraining.com
Natural High
Up North Prevention facilitates the healthy roles of influencers, educators, and peer groups to help young people discover those core activities in their lives that uplift, inspire, and motivate them — to find their ‘Natural High’ rather than use alcohol or drugs. Program is designed for 4th-12th graders.
Learn more about Natural High
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Photovoice
Photovoice is a visual research methodology that allows participants to use photography to document, reflect upon, and communicate issues of concerns surrounding substance misuse in their communities. Participants are provided framing questions that they answer through their photos and stories. It is used to impact policies and inspire change at the community level.
Prime For Life
Prime For Life® provides a judgment-free way of understanding how alcohol and drug-related problems develop, what we can do to prevent them, and why sometimes we need help. It’s for the curious, the concerned, and those making high-risk choices. Program is most appropriate for ages 13 and older. Prime For Life will help all participants reflect on personal choices, be inspired and motivated to make changes, and most importantly, protect the things they value most in life.
Learn more about Prime For Life at:
Guiding Good Choices
In five or six sessions, parents and caregivers learn specific actions that promote healthy development and reduce risky behavior in the teen years. Home practice and weekly family meetings build family connections and help families apply skills in real life. Guiding Good Choices® emphasizes strong family bonds as the key that motivates preteens to follow family guidelines and stay on a course toward better health and educational outcomes as teenagers.
TalkSooner Campaign
The TalkSooner Campaign is a resource for parents to access information about substance use prevention. TalkSooner provides a variety of resources to make the conversation easier: drug facts, trends and information, signs to watch for if there are concerns about youth use, and tips for how to talk to youth about this complicated topic. TalkSooner wants to help parents feel empowered to have conversations and set appropriate expectations with their children. Parents can find our resources in multiple ways including: social media, Android and Apple apps, a website, billboard campaigns, and more.
LifeSkills Parent Training
Program Overview
The award-winning Botvin LifeSkills Training Parent Program is a skills-based program designed to help parents strengthen communication with their children and reinforce competency in the skills that have been found to reduce and prevent substance misuse and violence. This program contains materials and exercises that help parents teach their children the skills that help them resist the threats of tobacco, drugs, and violence. These tools help parents prepare their children for a successful transition from adolescence to early adulthood.
Program Learning Objectives
The LifeSkills Training Parent Program helps to strengthen parenting skills in these areas:
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The issues related to adolescent drug misuse;
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How to be a good role model for your child, ways to convey a clear anti-drug message, and tips for effective family communication and parental monitoring
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Helping your children develop personal self-management and social skills.
Parent Program Lessons
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Family Communication
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Parental Monitoring
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Being a Good Role Model
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Use of Appropriate and Consistent Discipline
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Effects and Warning Signs of Substance Use
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Taking a Clear Stand on Drugs
Learn more about Lifeskills Parent Training at: www.lifeskillstraining.com
Coalitions
Up North Prevention provides support to several substance misuse prevention coalitions across northern Michigan. The coalitions are comprised of people from different parts of the community who all work together to improve public health in the region. Coalitions operate within a strategic prevention framework and practices are strongly influenced by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America.
Helping youth remain safe, healthy, and alcohol and drug free; accomplished through innovative student-led prevention programs, trainings and events for students and adults. SLS empowers students and adults to create safe, supportive, interactive, and engaging student-led environments so that they can lead change in their communities.
Key strategies include:
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Listen to students. Above all, youth voice matters. Students want to make their schools and communities better. They want to help their friends stay safe and they undoubtedly know what the most pressing problems are. We ask, then listen.
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Engage students. SLS students aren’t helpers in adult-created projects. They decide what is meaningful to them and create their own projects, seeking adult guidance and expertise as needed.
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Coach students in leadership skills and then let them lead.
Current participating schools include Alcona, Alpena, Atlanta, Hillman, Oscoda, Posen, Rogers City and Tawas.
Outreach and Awareness
Medicine Take-Back Events: The drug overdose epidemic is a clear and present public health and public safety threat. Up North Prevention encourages its communities’ people to remove unneeded medications from their homes as a measure of preventing medication misuse and opioid addiction from ever starting. Partnering with law enforcement, pharmacies and community locations raises awareness around importance of securing, monitoring and disposing of unused medicine; as their act of community and “doing their part”. A variety of community initiatives are coordinated to achieve this in places like senior citizen centers, at community events, in pharmacies or at law enforcement lobbies in the spring and fall.
Hidden In Plain Sight Trailers
The Hidden in Plain Sight trailer is a traveling teen bedroom to help parents learn about how their teens might be using substances in plain sight. This interactive exhibit allows local experts to guide parents through a simulated teenager's bedroom and explain areas of concern.
Up North Prevention is a sponsor of this initiative with established law enforcement partnerships to help navigate a Hidden In Plain Sight event in your community.
Education and Health Promotion
Up North Prevention provides outreach and awareness across the tip of the mitt. Health fairs, county fairs, parent teacher conferences, professional development gatherings, you might see us! We provide staff and volunteers, equip them with information, banners, billboards, social media – to get the word out about the importance of prevention and doing your part. Message purposing can be general stigma reduction, specific to community based events, relative to targeted issues around opioids, alcohol, vaping, tobacco or illicit drugs, or promotion of prevention coalitions across the region. If you’d like us at your event, we come with engaging educational materials and often freebie give aways (budget permitting).
Coalition leader, Stephanie Orlando, setting up educational information & gift bags for an outdoor health education fair.
Community Engagement
Up North Prevention endorses and encourages coalitions across the region to embrace activites that promote recovery friendly communities in an effort to reduce stigma and increase awareness around all facets of a community engaging in language, behaviors and activities that promote wellness and recovery.
One of over 100 participants of the September is Recovery Month community awareness activities. Over 20 local business participated on Fridays in September promoting the importance of community support for recovery.
Sheer Envy Salon of Alpena did their part in promoting recovery this past September, along with over 20 other area organizations and businesses
Community Trainings
Up North Prevention collaborates, coordinates and provides community-based training throughout northern Michigan. Showcasing some of our training partnerships below:
Continuing Medical Education for Medical Partners: Up North Prevention partners with several hospital systems; bringing experts to northern Michigan around effective pain treatment, medication assisted treatment and stigma reduction. Experts have included teams from University of Michigan Health System, Spectrum Health and Devos, bringing relevant and timely training opportunities to northern Michigan.
Overdose Reversal Training
Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before.
Naloxone is a safe antidote to a suspected overdose and, when given in time, can save a life. Research shows that when naloxone and overdose education are available to community members, overdose deaths decrease in those communities. Therefore, increasing the availability and targeted distribution of naloxone is a critical component of our efforts to reduce opioid-related overdose deaths and, when combined with the availability of effective treatment, to ending the opioid epidemic.
Up North Prevention facilitates access to naloxone and provides training on how to use it.
https://medlineplus.gov/medlineplus-videos/how-naloxone-saves-lives-in-opioid-overdose/
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Training and Intervention Procedures for Services (TIPS)
TIPS (Training for Intervention Procedures) is a dynamic skills based training program designed to prevent intoxication, drunk driving and underage drinking. It is a nationally-recognized program that teaches bartenders, waitstaff, and retail vendors about the legal responsibilities of selling alcohol, how to identify fake IDs, and how to recognize intoxicated patrons and refuse sales when necessary.
Drug Trend Panels: Up North Prevention coordinates panels of experts to bring answers to its people around what is happening in their community, increasing dialogue around important issues and calling to action local community stakeholders.
