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."

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.

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.

In thirteen chapters, twenty-four authors share their analyses, concerns, and conclusions in several domains including the: meaning and dynamics of multiculturalism affecting prevention intervention, relative risks and knowledge gaps across ethnic groups, social trends affecting health risks and substance abuse, lessons learned from substance abuse research and prevention, role of the media, promises and limits of the new public health paradigm for assessment, policy development, assurance of preventive services, and social action and empowerment for prevention in partnership with the public.