Building an effective community team and assessing community needs
In Uganda for any substance use prevention to yield positive outcomes, it should be backed by facts on community readiness. Interventions such as “Community That Care’’ (CTC) is one example of the evidence-based model that uses a proven community change process designed to reduce youth violence, alcohol and tobacco use as well as delinquency. Promoting School Community-University Partnership to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) is another model. Before adopting any evidence-based intervention like CTC or PROSPER, this has to be a community needs and resource assessment to determine community readiness to implement substance use prevention interventions as stepping stone to sustainable and long-term positive prevention outcomes.
Community needs and resources assessments will guide the team to get a clear picture of what is happening, what exists, programs available, policies already in place, human resources, technical support gaps as well available source funding. This will also help the team to compare the priority needs of the community in line with available resources and its readiness to determine whether it is a ready-to-go business. The team will also know whether there is available data on the age of initiation substance abuse for early or middle age, and other factors that increase the likelihood of substance use among other problem behaviors.
For us to develop an effective systems implementation, we need to appreciate our communities as agents of change, the target of change, settings of change. For us to be successful, we need to adopt an evidence-based intervention guided by needs assessment through learning from available local information, engage key community leaders and organizations and available community resources or infrastructures.
Furthermore, it will help us to foresee community strengths like skills and talents, identify community hubs to leverage from, link the EBIs to the existing community development plans for example If Eagles Youth Development Initiative is to implement any EBIs in Uganda, there is a need to integrated into activities in existing plans like ‘’ The Parish Development Model, Youth Livelihood Program among others.
As UPC 1_ CUR9 participant, all in all, I have realized that Module 4 focuses on strategies of creating, strengthening, implementing, and sustaining an evidenced-based intervention substance use prevention beyond the funding cycle.
