Blog: No bio box

Dennis Reilly, Project Director of the Reclaiming Futures initiative in Nassau County, New York, writes:
On November 14, 2008, the Nassau County Reclaiming Futures site hosted a full-day site visit for Reclaiming Futures National Program Office leaders Laura Burney Nissen, Jim Carlton, and Reclaiming Futures Anchorage coach Tom Begich. We were very pleased with the results of this meeting, and thought we should share our planning process and site visit preparations with other sites.
 
(Shown here are the Honorable John G. Marks, who presides over the Nassau County Juvenile Treatment Court, and Warren Graham, who directs the  juvenile treatment court and co-directs the local Reclaiming Futures initiatve. Click on the image to enlarge it and see what they're holding.)

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of conducting focus groups with youth who were in various stages of recovery following treatment. The consistency of responses among the groups of youth I spoke with was overwhelming and pushed me to think about what we need to do for youth following treatment that might be different than for adults.
 
A major theme that came out of each group was that they felt abandoned after they completed treatment. They were told things like:

Michael L. Dennis, Ph.D.

As the first, five-year pilot phase of Reclaiming Futures came to a close, each of the participating Fellowships published a report that contains highly valuable information for any community attempting to improve the way its system deals with youth caught in the cycle of drugs, alcohol and crime. (Reclaiming Futures uses professional "Fellowships" of judges, probation officers, treatment professionals, community members, and local project directors to drive change in local communities. The Fellows from all participating communities gather several times a year to share what they're learning.)
These  Fellowship reports are available on the Reclaiming Futures website, but at the Project Directors' conference last week, I was asked to repost them in one place. And why not? After all, they're not just useful for Reclaiming Futures communities, they're useful for any community that wishes to change the way it does business for teens in the justice system who need addiction treatment. So, here they all are -- 

For those of you who liked our post listing resources for identifying evidence-based adolescent treatment models, here's another valuable resource.
It's a compendium of evidence-based treatment practices, compiled by the Southern Coast Addiction Technology Transfer Center (SCATTC) last February. (This guide contains both adult and juvenile practices - adolescent-related material begins on p. 42.)

We've had another response to our recent call for recommendations on good curricula on parenting training. (Other suggestions appear here.) A commenter wondered what other jurisdictions' experience has been with the Family Support Network (FSN) protocol, pictured here.
FSN is one of the five Cannabis Youth Treatment (CYT) protocols tested and promulgated by SAMHSA and CSAT. (You can download all of them here for free.)
So here's the questions:

A few quick links that crossed our desk today:

• Many of you probably saw this on Join Together, but it's worth repeating: according to a new national survey, 19% of teens surveyed say that it's easier for them to buy prescription drugs than beer, cigarettes, or marijuana. More info on the survey from the Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) at the University of Maryland here.

[This is the second part of a two-part post. See first post here.]
3. Be prepared for the unexpected. You can't plan for every contingency, but plan for the worst, so you'll be as prepared as you can be.

• What happens if someone you were counting on to testify comes down with pneumonia?
• What if one of your partners adds an extra speaker you didn't plan for?
• What if several legislators on the committee you were scheduled to testify before are unable to attend the hearing, due to family emergencies and other crucial commitments? 

(This is the first part of a two-part post. Read the second post here.)
Last week, Laura Nissen of Reclaiming Futures and other experts on drug and alcohol treatment were invited to testify at a hearing by the Oregon State Senate Health and Human Services Committee. Legislators rarely get the chance to learn about adolescent substance abuse in depth, and this was a great opportunity to help them understand the problem -- and possible solutions.
You can do this, too. Here's how organizers made it happen in Oregon: