High risk drinking consortium gets national attention

12 Feb 2016    

A CEHS housed program in the Department of Educational Psychology that has worked since 1979 to prevent alcohol and drug abuse in Nebraska was on a national stage Feb. 10. Megan Hopkins, project manager for the Nebraska Collegiate Consortium To Reduce High Risk Drinking (NCC), participated in a national webinar to rollout a new toolkit for prevention practitioners. The toolkit is a project of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies. The toolkit provides resources to help build the capacity to initiate, strengthen, and maintain collaborations that enhance prevention processes and improve health outcomes.

On the webinar, Hopkins spoke about the NCC’s offshoot, the Omaha Collegiate Consortium, which brought together eight Omaha-area colleges and universities to share resources and partner in reducing high-risk drinking among its college students. It is funded by a SAMHSA Partnership for Success Grant and is currently in the third year of five years of funding that helps fund data collection and sharing among the institutions and allows for high-risk drinking prevention at each institution and in the Omaha community. The OCC is featured in the toolkit which can be viewed at http://go.unl.edu/occ216.

The NCC is coordinating the rollout of a statewide educational program on 26 campuses across Nebraska, and is a project of the Nebraska Prevention Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse based in Educational Psychology. NCC was founded 10 years ago with 13 member institutes, and now it includes 26 intuitions of higher education across Nebraska.

The Nebraska Prevention Center was founded in 1979 by Ian Newman (EDPS) to provide leadership and technical assistance to government and educational agencies. In addition to Newman and Hopkins, other CEHS faculty/staff involved in the program are Duane Shell and Michele Maas.