Assessing Anti-Drug Community Coalitions

There are a number of factors that are involved in understanding the issues and factors involved in creating an effective Community Anti Drug Coalition. This can be done but it is contingent on knowing and being able to master the different issues and elements as you go along. If you have done your homework in creating your Anti Drug Group or community coalition then you likely have had a positive impact on one or more local Drug Addiction Treatment Centers.

One of the first steps is to review all of the literature that you have dealt with in creating your Anti Drug Coalition. Look at the literature, and evaluate how effective it is in communicating your message, and what you are trying to accomplish. This will give you a good feel for how well your community coalition is getting its message out to its target audience.

Next, sit down and work to contact some of the different experts in the field, such as nationally known anti drug prevention experts, people associated with different programs located around the United States. Choose to contact between 12 and 15 people, and submit a list of questions to them ahead of time, before your interview. It should include questions on Drug Addiction Treatment Center Success and effectiveness in their local areas.

These questions should deal with the Community Coalitions in their area, how well they are dealing with the issues in their area, and what effects these coalitions are having on their communities.

This type of interview process will help you to establish a baseline for comparison. You can look at your coalition and compare how it is doing to others on a National and regional basis. This is a successful method but rather time consuming, it is highly effective but it takes some time to meet with via telephone these people. Remember to ask how different Drug Addiction Treatment is progressing in their areas and locations.

Construct a survey that you can effectively use, using these types of coalition success questions to send to each of the coalitions that are mentioned by these experts you contact. This will give you some different responses, dealing with funding, staffing, program effectiveness, history and other issues of the coalitions that you are investigating. You should be able to contact a variety of different programs and Drug Addiction Treatment Center facilities in this manner.

Then, choose about 7 different Coalitions to visit, you can decide whether to select an overview of the different coalitions and city anti drug programs, or the 7 top coalitions based on the Data that you collect. Either way, this will be a issue of choosing to visit these seven different Cities and their coalitions, and seeing first hand how things are done.

Then, using the telephone surveys, the email and mail surveys, and the in person interviews at the different programs and coalitions you have visited, sit back and examine how well your coalition locally stacks up. Remember, each coalition will have a different focus, and not all will have their own Drug Addiction Treatment Center, some will use other methods in dealing with addiction in their communities.

This type of extensive self review can be very rewarding, despite being very time and resource intensive. Talk to community members in your neighborhood, and community leaders. Talking to different people in your community will give you additional resource data for how well your coalition or group is doing. Taking all of this data together should give you a good idea of how well you are doing, as well as helping provide assistance in dealing with new issues in the future. You can help decide which is the best type of Drug Addiction Treatment Center would work best in your local community.