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Alternatives

Alternatives—activities designed to provide healthy, positive, pro-social diversions for young people to steer them from alcohol and other drugs—can complement other strategies by occupying young people’s time during the non-school hours. Mentoring, community service, recreational programs, sober parties and dances, and youth drop-in centers, are just a few examples of alternative strategies being used to promote substance-free lifestyles. Alternatives function as a valuable adjunct to primary prevention efforts and can make prevention fun.

Specific resources contained on this site include the following:

Alternatives: A Strategy for Prevention Practitioners.
A 22-page paper on alternatives: What it means as a prevention
strategy and how you can incorporate it into your work as a prevention practitioner. It looks at the benefits of alternatives as a prevention strategy, as well as types of alternatives programs, including mentoring programs, community service and service learning programs, skill-building programs, and recreational activities.

Alternatives Fact Sheet and Illustration
(Webpage, Acrobat 2 pages) This document describes how alternatives programs can be used in substance abuse prevention, plus an illustration—a real-life example of alternatives in action.

Alternatives Video. Created by CSAP’s Northeast CAPT, this video features features an intergenerational program that has found different ways to bring young students together with older adults, their parents, and other family members.

This video is accessible using windows media player 9 series for Windows 98 2nd ed., Me, and 2000. Click here to download it. Click here to read transcript.

Alternatives Resources. This document contains a list of resources—both online and in print—designed to help you implement alternatives strategies in your community.