The United State Senate unanimously confirmed Pamela Hyde as Administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

“Pamela Hyde has worked tirelessly on behalf of the people of New Mexico to expand access to health and human services programs and improve their quality,” said Secretary Sebelius. “With over 30 years of experience in both the private and public sectors, Pamela’s health policy expertise and management experience will be invaluable to our Department. She will be an outstanding leader at SAMHSA, and I look forward to working with her in this new role.”

Grants of up to $150,000 are available for initiatives that use Health Impact Assessment (HIA) techniques to help policymakers assess proposed projects and programs in terms of their impact on health consequences and costs.

The Health Impact Project — a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts — will award grants of $25,000 to $150,000 to demonstrate the effectiveness of HIAs and promote their use in policymaking at all levels of government. Certain applications for grants of more than $150,000 also may be considered on an exceptional basis. Programs must be completed within 24 months.

Application deadline is open. For full details, see the RWJF website.

Preparing grant applications can be a bit challenging.  LifeSkills Training offers several grant application tools to help you in applying for local, state, and federal funding.

http://www.lifeskillstraining.com/grant_writing.php

In the wake of several recent highly-publicized stories about violence among school-aged children, a new report shows that school districts participating in the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative substantially improved the safety of their students.  According to the report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), over a three-year period, school districts participating in the Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant program reported fewer students involved in violent incidents, decreased levels of experienced and witnessed violence, and improvements in overall school safety and violence prevention.

Key findings from the Safe Schools/Healthy Students National Evaluation include:

• A 15 percent decrease in the number of students involved in violent incidents during the grant period (from 17, 800 in year 1 to 15,163 in year 3).
• A 12 percent decrease in the number of students reporting that they had experienced or witnessed violence from year 1 of the grant period to year 3.
• Most staff at grantee schools reported that the Initiative had made their schools safer. By year 3 of the grant, 84 percent said the Initiative had improved school safety, 77 percent said it had reduced violence on campus, and 75 percent said it had reduced violence in the community.

For more information on the Safe Schools/Healthy Students visit: http://www.sshs.samhsa.gov/apply/default.aspx

Members of Congress continue to work at a fast and furious pace to come to an agreement on healthcare reform legislation, but we need your help now if we want to get substance abuse prevention included in this critical legislation. If you haven’t already, click here to respond to CADCA’s current legislative alert.

Responding to this legislative alert will ensure that the final version of healthcare reform includes language that:

1) explicitly includes substance abuse prevention in the definition of community based prevention; and
2) explicitly includes substance use disorders as part of the definition of chronic disease, condition or illness.

Please respond to CADCA’s legislative alert as soon as possible to ask members of Congress to explicitly include substance abuse prevention in the definition of community based prevention, and substance use disorder in the definition of chronic disease, condition or illness.

For additional information, please contact Kelly Lieupo, Director of Public Policy, at 703-706-0560 ext. 241, or via e-mail at klieupo@cadca.org.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has released the final application for more than $4 billion from the Race to the Top Fund, which will reward states that have raised student performance in the past and have the capacity to accelerate achievement gains with innovative reforms.

To qualify, states must have no legal barriers to linking student growth and achievement data to teachers and principals for the purposes of evaluation. They also must have the department’s approval for their plans for both phases of the Recovery Act’s State Fiscal Stabilization Fund prior to being awarded a grant.

Click here for more information and to view the official grant announcement.

Application deadline is June 1, 2010

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Evidence-based prevention programs, such as Botvin LifeSkills Training, have shown the greatest success in the reduction of negative youth behaviors, such as delinquency, violence and substance abuse. In addition, such programs reduce financial burdens on taxpayers, such as prison, drug treatment and social service costs.

The Botvin LifeSkills Training Program is recognized on the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations review of prevention programs as well as the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence Blueprints Model and Promising Programs.

Click here to learn more about the criteria used to judge model programs.

Recent grants totaling more than $7.9 million will allow an Iowa State University youth drug prevention program to expand to help youngsters and families across the United States.

The Partnerships in Prevention Science Institute at ISU is the home of PROSPER, a program developed by scientists at ISU and Penn State to create evidence-based prevention programs in Iowa and Pennsylvania. PROSPER is short for Promoting School-Community-University Partnerships to Enhance Resilience.

Richard Spoth, director of the Partnerships in Prevention Science Institute, said what makes PROSPER unique is that all of the programs it implements are based on scientific results.

Click here to read the entire article.

According to researchers, governments should outlaw alcoholic-beverage firms from sponsoring sporting events and sports teams.

Researchers, from Australia’s Newcastle University and The University of Manchester in Great Britain, stated that the alcohol industry has ignored their 2008 report showing a link between alcohol sponsorship of sports and high-risk drinking among participants.

Researcher, Kerry O’Brien, states “Sport administrators are sending mixed messages to participants and fans when, on the one hand, they embrace and peddle alcohol via their sport, while on the other they punish individual sport stars and fans when they display loutish behavior while intoxicated”.

Click here to view the full article.

In a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), there is evidence that secondhand smoke can trigger heart attacks. The report also suggests that those with heart conditions should avoid exposure to tobacco smoke.

Requested by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the report stated there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke, and that people with cardiovascular disease could risk heart attack with less than an hour’s exposure to environmental tobacco smoke.

“If you have heart disease, you really need to stay away from secondhand smoke. It’s an immediate threat to your life,” said researcher Neal Benowitz of the University of California at San Francisco. Benowitz added that everyone, in fact, should avoid secondhand smoke, since many people who have heart disease are not aware of the problem if they have never had a heart attack.

Click here to view the report.