The Colorado Office of Behavioral Health hired CHI to provide strategic advice on primary prevention of substance use. This page showcases our work.
The spotlight is shining on Colorado’s growing problem with drug overdoses. Now community leaders are turning their focus to preventing substance abuse from happening in the first place.
Primary prevention is one way to help. It’s a public health approach to help communities avoid substance abuse and many related problems such as depression, violence and teen pregnancy.
We know a lot more about primary prevention than we did 30 years ago. The thinking has changed — shifting from scare tactics and required drug testing to strengthening families and communities and reducing risk factors.
Colorado has several funders and hundreds of programs working to promote substance use primary prevention. Yet some needs are going unmet, and funders are duplicating other efforts.
The Colorado Department of Human Services, Office of Behavioral Health (OBH) is one of the state’s main prevention program funders. OBH hired the Colorado Health Institute to conduct a statewide needs assessment of substance use primary prevention. The goal is to help OBH and other statewide funders better use their resources to strengthen Colorado’s substance use prevention programming.
The result is the Statewide Needs Assessment of Primary Prevention for Substance Use (SNAPS).
Our needs assessment report reveals that:
- Communities need targeted investments that change the conversation about substance use for youth and their families.
- Local program administrators — like schools and community organizations — need technical assistance to adopt evidence-based approaches, plus better cooperation among funders.
- Statewide funders, like OBH, need a systematic way to coordinate existing efforts, reduce overlap and address unfunded needs.
