Shows how to create a comprehensive, community-wide prevention program to effectively confront the serious drug and alcohol problems threatening our youth. Shows how to employ community mobilization, educational strategies, volunteerism, and mass media to achieve significant reductions in adolescent drug use.

Introduces the concept of community readiness for substance abuse prevention programming. Defines community readiness, provides a rationale for assessing a community's readiness prior to the planning or implementation of prevention activities, identifies seven factors for assessing community readiness, and offers strategies for increasing readiness factors found to be deficient. Case study. Intended for use with the handbook "Drug Abuse Prevention: What Works" and "Drug Abuse Prevention and Community Readiness: Training Facilitator's Manual."

Provides practitioners with the information they need to prepare their communities for prevention programming & to select & implement drug abuse prevention strategies that effectively address the needs of their local communities. The target audience for this document includes prevention program administrators, prevention specialists, community volunteers, community activists, parents, teachers, counselors, etc. Contents: intro. to selective prevention; intro. to & key elements of the strengthening families program; & implementation of the strengthening families program. Appendixes on skills training programs for parents, children & families.

Provides practitioners with the info. to prepare their communities for prevention programming and to select and implement drug abuse prevention strategies that effectively address the needs of their local communities. The audience includes prevention program administrators, prevention specialists, community volunteers and activists, parents, teachers, counselors, and others who have an interest in drug abuse and its prevention. Contents: intro. to universal prevention; intro. to project STAR (a communitywide universal prevention program); key elements of project STAR; project STAR training require.; and implementation of project STAR.