Building Healthy Individuals, Families, and Communities: Creating Lasting Connections

This work describes a programme, Creating Lasting Family Connections , which is based on COPE’s demonstration programme, Creating Lasting Connections (CLC). CLC was designed as an ecumenical, community based programme that focused on increasing community, family and individual (youth) protective factors that would lead to delaying the onset and reducing the frequency of alcohol and other drug use among at-risk 12-14 year olds. CLC received the Center for Substance Abuse Pre vention’s Exemplary Prevention Program Award for 1994; it has been included in the International Youth Foundation’s YouthNet International, a directory of youth programmes worldwide; finally, it was selected as one of only seven model prevention programs by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention for national dissemination. While the programme focuses on alcohol and other drug-related issues and outcomes, much of this approach is applicable to youth and families across a larger spectrum of issues and behaviours, including violence and inappropriate sexual behaviour.