From The State Minnesota awarded State Incentive Grant from CSAP by Al Fredrickson

Minnesota, through the Governor's office, has received one of 14 State Incentive Grants (SIG). This entails receiving approximately $3 million per year for the next three years. Eighty-five percent of the dollars must be directed to community prevention programs.

As important as the new dollars are, the SIG presents an opportunity for coordination of prevention funding and activities unprecedented in our state's history. While there have been a variety of federal funding streams coming into the states for ATOD prevention activities, they are dispersed to a variety of agencies with little or no coordination. This has created a situation where unnecessary duplication of projects is a possibility. The SIG seeks to solve this problem.

Minnesota's SIG project, Minnesota Prevention Forward to the Future (MPFF), has as its stated purpose, "to coordinate prevention efforts in Minnesota in order to reduce substance use and related problems among youth." It will result in the development of a comprehensive, statewide prevention strategy that recasts the prevention delivery system, retains what is of value, and provides support for evaluation-driven, successful programs.

The two goals of MPFF are:

0. coordinate, leverage and/or redirect substance abuse prevention resources in order that resources are directed to effective and promising prevention approaches to reduce substance use by youth;
1. develop and implement a statewide prevention strategy grounded in research findings to improve community-based prevention efforts resulting in a reduction of substance use among youth.

There are many objectives to be accomplished under each of the goals. One unique part of the MPFF is the use of a Cooperative Agreement Advisory Committee (CAAC). This committee will be made up of a diverse selection of agency heads, special populations, youth, community prevention organizations, researchers, business community, health care community, faith community, statewide prevention coalitions, and foundations, with care taken to assure representation of urban, suburban and greater Minnesota.

So, while the addition of $3 million is certainly needed, the biggest impact of the SIG may well be by the development of a statewide prevention strategy and the coordination of resources and activities. Clearly, the intent from CSAP is to develop a new way of doing the business of prevention.

Al Fredrickson, Prevention Coordinator, Chemical Dependency Program Division, MN Department of Human Services