In New Brunswick, the Planet Youth Guidance Program will be implemented as five-year pilot project in four regions:
More than a survey
Planet Youth’s method focuses on solutions that includes a bi-annual survey. The project’s goal is to use the data to develop community-led solutions for creating healthy communities. By implementing the Planet Youth model, it offers our province an opportunity to access its tools, methodology, services, and expertise, while complementing pre-existing initiatives and local expertise in New Brunswick.
Quick turnaround time
Anonymous survey data collected from grade 10 students in participating pilot areas will be returned in 6-8 weeks. This will help communities get the most up-to-date snapshot of youth substance use risk and protective factors. These factors include family, peer group, leisure time, school, and community.
Community-based and community led
Action Teams will be formed within each pilot site with a wide variety of stakeholders, including parents/guardians/families and community members as well as school, health promotion, and non-profit partners. There will also be opportunities for youth to get involved. Support, recommendations, training, and workshops will be offered to help identify and implement effective solutions, and the Action Teams will determine what will work best within each local community!
Non-prescriptive
Action Teams will use their own expertise, as well as work with their community, to determine what actions will work best. Planet Youth’s guidance program isn’t a ‘cookie cutter’ approach. All the successful measures used in Iceland may not be relevant for New Brunswick. However, the Icelandic Prevention Model’s successful approach offers an opportunity to use lessons learned and make adaptations based on the local context.
Focused on primary prevention
Substance use prevention is a long-term investment. Although some prevention efforts can have positive effects in the short-term, the most impactful results will occur over time, making progress toward the goal of a healthier future for our youth and society in the long-term.
The Planet Youth Guidance program requires a shift in thinking. It requires going from an individual perspective to a collective perspective, and from short-term goal setting to long-term goal setting.
There are 10 steps to implementation of the Planet Youth Guidance program:
Step 1: Local coalition identification, development and capacity building
Step 2: Local funding identification, development and capacity building
Step 3: Pre-data collection planning and community engagement
Step 4: Data collection and processing, including data driven diagnostics
Step 5: Enhancing community participation and engagement
Step 6: Dissemination of findings
Step 7: Community goal-setting and other organized responses to the findings
Step 8: Policy and practice alignment
Step 9: Child and adolescent immersion in primary prevention environments, activities, and messages.
Step 10: Repeat Steps 1-9 (every two years in New Brunswick)
Areas of focus
The model is designed to strengthen protective factors, mitigate risk factors, and build healthy community environments for positive youth development by focusing on the local community including leisure (out-of-school) time, family, peer group, as well as the broader community and societal environments.
Substance use is a leading contributor to poor health outcomes. Substance use in youth is a concern. To make an impact we need to work on factors that affect the health of all New Brunswickers, known as the determinants of health.
Substance use prevention not only benefits the health and well-being of the population, but also helps to improve community safety, decrease injuries, and reduces the high health-care, social, and legal costs associated with substance use each year.
The impact of reducing overall substance use and delaying first use of substances (as younger age of first use increases the risk of harms) has a positive impact on the individuals – the young people, as well as on the community.
