Primary Prevention Trends: Policy Priorities, Frameworks, and Community Choice

Session Description: Primary prevention continues to evolve as community prevention organizations evaluate new models, emerging practices, and changing policy priorities. This session examines trends in substance use primary prevention, including budgetary constraints, promotion of proprietary prevention packages, and federal prevention policy and funding priorities. The speakers will present the U.S. Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) and a widely publicized foreign prevention model as two process-oriented approaches to long-term, data-informed, community-based substance use prevention. They will describe the approaches' conceptual alignment across assessment, capacity, planning, implementation, and evaluation while identifying practical differences in cost, timeline, data collection, coalition breadth, and implementation flexibility. The session will also address how communities can employ coalitions to engage community institutions in three prevention strategies consistent with federal priorities: employers in Recovery Friendly Workplace initiatives, faith-based communities in youth-led activities, and law enforcement in age verification strategies and merchant education as an access-reduction strategy for alcohol, tobacco, and other retail-based mood altering products. Using both the Strategic Prevention Framework and a proprietary consulting-based prevention model as reference points, speakers will assess how each approach supports or constrains local decision-making based on coalition capacity, program inputs and design, and resource allocation. Participants will consider how fiscal and programmatic flexibility can allow communities to invest prevention dollars in local assets, such as prevention staff, data capacity, and evidence-based or experience-informed strategies. The session will conclude with practical takeaways for selecting, adapting, and sustaining primary prevention strategies, followed by Q&A.