Community-Based Prevention: Meeting You Where You Are

All Around the World

One of my favorite things about prevention work is that I get to be a guest in every kind of community. I often tell new Prevention Specialists of my first three assignments: the week after my job training, I taught at a school in Doha, Qatar that primarily had American and British students. The next week, I taught at a school in Beijing, China, that primarily had British, European, and Chinese students. The week after that, I taught at a school run by the United Nations in Hanoi, Vietnam, with students from all around the world.

Each school had its own culture. School culture is created by the combination of school rules and values, daily schedule and rhythms, the usually diverse collection of students making up the student body, the common means of communication, different sports and other extracurriculars and which ones are most popular, how formal and informal teacher-student relationships are, the list goes on.

Although it gets used a bunch, if you stop and think about it, “culture” is not an easily defined word. We use it to refer to all kinds of things – influencers and socials, YA fiction, MCU movies, and political hot takes. It can refer to differences between generations, like the huge cultural differences between me (Xennial) and my wife (Millennial) even though I’m only two years older. It can even refer to differences between age groups that are more persistent across time, like the things most adults will tell you (often incorrectly) are the differences between being an adult and being a teenager.

From now on, when you think about the definition of culture, however else you describe it, I’d like you to include something simple: meaning. As in, whatever else it is, culture is a system within which people create, exchange, share, produce, and perceive meaning. According to this definition, everyone who identifies as part of a certain culture is a creator and communicator of the meanings of things within that culture.

I’ve seen every kind of school culture. As a Prevention Specialist, I celebrate them all and enjoy observing the ways students in different places throughout different times choose to exist within their school’s culture. I’ve seen lots of healthy things and some unhealthy things. And if you think about how big a term culture is, how many different things go into the creation of a culture, it won’t surprise you to reach the same conclusion I have, that every school’s culture is completely unique.

Consider the example of the school embracing one totally retro hobby: hacky sack. I’m old enough to remember the second time this came around, in the 1990’s – the first time would have been around the time I was born, in the early 1980’s. I haven’t seen it anywhere I’ve been personally, but another Prevention Specialist told me how weirded out she was (we’re close to the same age) to walk into a school and see kids up and down the halls, grouped in circles small and large, tricking and kicking around that little bean-bag ball! It gave the school a completely unique vibe. Any time you’re talking about a vibe, you’re probably observing something related to culture. 

“The school had imposed a pretty strict phone ban the year before,” my friend told me, “and the kids showed up this year with hacky sacks. I noticed throughout the school how much the kids and teachers talked more; a teacher would walk by and join in for a second. I really saw this connection the whole school happened to have, from sometimes random hacky sacks flying across the hall. It was completely student-led.”

I imagine that phone ban caused a lot of anxiety in a lot of students, who eventually found the need to do something with the time they’d otherwise spend gaming, or on socials, or whatever their phone offered them as a distraction in the moment. And somehow, in a way maybe nobody could even explain anymore, the kids found their way to hacky sack. My coworker loved it.

This uniqueness is part of what makes Prevention Specialists at Prevention Academy so engaging – it’s because we’re so engaged! We’re so curious about your culture, about what it’s like to be a student at your school; we want to find the answers we’ll never hear anywhere else to questions we ask everywhere we go. There’s a school I used to visit in Houston, TX all the time, that was bilingual: students there spoke English and French. Their parents were usually oil-industry employees from French-speaking nations, working in their companies’ Texas offices. These students had some amazing questions about what experiences people who take substances may have; we got into one deep discussion about hallucinogenic drugs that I’ve never had anywhere else.

I wonder what discussions we’ll have when we visit your school? It’s a strange thing, being a teacher – the more we let our students teach us, the more effective we can be at providing you with the information that’s really important to you. And that’s really where I’m going with this culture piece: the uniqueness of every school requires the curiosity of every Prevention Specialist in order for us to get to know your schools. That’s what helps us ensure that every lesson we provide is full of the knowledge you seek, in the language you understand, to help you develop the skills you need to make the healthiest decisions you can about alcohol and other drugs.

I still have a lot to learn about what life is like for the students of Delaware and Montgomery Counties; I’m sure it’s a journey that I’ll never complete. But one school at a time, I’m letting you tell me who you are, so I can tell you what you need to know.