Step Three:  DEVELOP AN ACTION PLAN

During Step Two, you were introduced to the critical importance of collecting information appropriate for your community and the substance use problem area that you want to address. For environmental approaches to substance abuse prevention, this information can include collecting relevant information to enable you to evaluate community risk factors, community protective factors, and community readiness for action.

Your community’s readiness or interest, ability, and willingness to initiate substance abuse efforts is a dynamic process. Thus, prevention programs have an opportunity not simply to evaluate the specific stage of a community’s readiness, but to increase their community’s readiness to change. Since a community’s readiness can propel or frustrate your prevention effort, we recommend that you view and enact your action plan through the perspective of improving your community’s readiness for prevention. For this reason, Step Three: Develop an Action Plan focuses on improving program and community readiness for prevention, and encourages coalition building as a standard building block of those processes.

Remember that this tutorial is designed to be used by prevention practitioners at varying levels of experience and expertise. Similarly, prevention programs will be at different levels of development and program maturity. As a result, you may have already accomplished some of the recommendations in this section. However, review this information to ensure that you have addressed the recommended issues. And remember, information in the various steps of the tutorial will purposefully overlap to some degree as a reminder to you of their importance.