February 08, 2013
SACY Project Update!
By
Linh Tra
Linh Tra is a Bachelor of Nursing student at Vancouver Community College and is interning with Hello Cool World as part of her community health clinical.
Hello Cool World has been working on a project with the SACY team (School Aged Children and Youth), along with the Vancouver School Board. The SACY project is a Substance Use Prevention Initiative that engages students, parents, teachers, administrators and the greater community in a process to strengthen school-based alcohol and drug prevention and early-intervention programs and policies. Hello Cool World and SACY interviewed about a dozen high school students from all over Vancouver. We will be putting together 4 short videos around the 4 key messages about alcohol and drug prevention: be smart, speak up, be safe, and get support.
The youth of the SACY project reported that they experience many stressors and pressures as teenagers. Some of these include the pressure to find who they are, the pressure from parents and teachers to succeed in school, and pressure from peers to fit in. They also mentioned that some issues youth face are related to drugs, alcohol, self image, bullying, self harm, relationships, sexuality, etc. They felt pressures from everyone around them to be or act a certain way or to do certain things with their futures and this caused much stress for them. The youth noticed that many teens are unable to effectively cope with their stress. Therefore, this may lead to many risk taking behaviours. As one youth said, “pot and liquor for the most part is like, people use those as kind of an outlet.”
I honestly forgot how stressful it is to be a teenager, so it’s great that SACY recognizes that these are big issues for youth and help address these issues. We know that just sending youth the message to say no to drugs doesn’t work. SACY’s goal is to provide a safe and supportive environment at school to promote healthy informed decisions and decrease risk-taking behaviours. SACY also wants to reach out to parents, teachers, and the greater community to reduce stigma and to increase awareness and education about the issues that youth face. Hello Cool World hopes to help SACY spread the message in a cool and effective way! We’ll keep you posted about the progress of this exciting project!
Tag(s):
Youth
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