MPI will be partnering with Friday Night Live at Spring Jam 2020. This weekend long leadership conference will bring together middle school youth and the goal is to strengthen individuals as well as chapters through workshops and team events. The focus will be on alcohol and drug prevention.

For more information click here.

As today is World Cancer Day, we wanted to highlight the great work of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. 58 years ago today St Jude’s opened. This leading children’s hospital treats the toughest childhood cancers and pediatric diseases. When Danny Thomas founded the hospital in 1962, he envisioned a hospital that would treat children regardless of race, color, creed or their family's ability to pay. Since then, their groundbreaking research has helped better the survival rate for childhood cancer from 20% in 1962 to more than 80% today.

We thank St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for their amazing work and we are proud to support this organization.

Learn more at https://www.stjude.org/.

MPI is proud to partner with the Coalition for a Safe and Healthy Arden Arcade (CSHAA) for their upcoming summit in March. The Sacramento County Coalition for Youth presents the 2020 Sacramento Marijuana Prevention Summit. Registration is now open!

The summit will feature keynotes from state and national experts, input from local leaders, and educational opportunities to continue the discussion regarding the impacts of recreational marijuana legalization on our community and our youth.

We are excited to have with us two amazing plenary speakers, Will Jones III and Joe Eberstein. Will Jones III serves as the Communications and Outreach Associate at SAM. He is an experienced speaker and community activist working on issues of social justice at the local and national level. Joe Eberstein works for the Center for Community Research Inc.; he is the Program Manager for the San Diego County (MPI) Marijuana Prevention Initiative.

For more informartion, click here.

MPI will be providing trainings to both youth and staff at Urban Street Angels. The training will be on January 28th. A key mission of Urban Street Angels is supporting housing and job training programs for transitional-age homeless youth, to help them off the streets with a hand up.

Transitional-age youth are individuals between the ages of 18 and 25. Many have suffered from years of abuse, trauma, and tough conditions while living on the streets. The needs of this demographic, largely ignored by existing support services, guided our growth toward our current mission.

To see more about Urban Street Angels click here,

As the CCR team continues to participate in the Addiction Treatment Starts Here: Community Partnerships learning collaborative, we are using system design tools to think differently about our work. Systems thinking requires looking at interrelated factors to understand their combined effects. One tool we’ve found to be very helpful is the Iceberg Model, which helps to examine events presented and the root of such systematic issues, related to an iceberg because much of the structure is hidden out of sight.

Our team led a focus group last year using the Iceberg Model to determine events, patterns, structures, and mental models regarding Opioid Use Disorder. An example includes:

• Event: What is happening at the surface level.
• An individual is overwhelmed when re-entering the system of care.
• Pattern: Similar events that have been taking place over time.
• The individual does not know how to build healthy relationships or feels loneliness
• Structures: What is causing the pattern (physical things, organizations, policies, rituals).
• There is a lack of mental health resources, limited access to harm reduction services, and limited hours at treatment facilities.
• Mental models: Attitudes, beliefs, morals, expectations, and values that allow structures to continue functioning as they are.
• There is stigma within jail or Medication Assisted Treatment facilities and a lack of understanding.

In this way of systematic thinking, you can see how various factors often build on one another and the need to explore these levels to promote positive change. From our example, feelings of being overwhelmed may by due to not knowing how to reach out and/or from the fear of encountering stigma, therefore we can focus on creating understanding relationships in our program.

Try using this tool in your next project! For more information, visit https://thinkjarcollective.com/tools/iceberg-systems-mapping-tool-to-identify-leverage-points-for-change/.