PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience

What's on the menu?

PROSPER has a menu of evidence-based programs aimed at sixth and seventh graders. These have all been successful in preventing risky behaviors in youth, promoting positive youth development and strengthening families.

Family-Focused Program

Strengthening Families: for Parents and Youth 10-14

This program reduces substance abuse and other problem behaviors. Strengthening Families includes interactive sessions that portray typical youth and parent situations. There are discussions, role playing, learning games and family projects. Over seven sessions, youth and parents first meet individually and then share time together to increase parent-child bonding and improve communication.

 

School-based Programs

All Stars

All Stars delays or prevents substance abuse, violence, sexual activity and other risky behaviors by developing positive personal characteristics. It helps students aspire to good goals, establish positive norms, build personal commitments. It also promotes bonding with school and community organizations and promotes positive parental attentiveness.

LifeSkills Training

This program seeks to influence the social and psychological factors that contribute to the initiation and early use of substances. LifeSkills Training focuses on three critical skill development areas that research has shown can substantially reduce the likelihood of high-risk behaviors. Areas of focus include drug resistance skills, personal self-management skills and general social skills. The program has 15 sessions with three optional sessions that target violence prevention and has supplemental parent–school involvement sessions.

Project Alert

This program has a track record of dramatically reducing both the regular use of substances and the onset of substance abuse. It focuses on substances that adolescents are most likely to use such as tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and inhalants. Participatory activities and videos help motivate adolescents against drug use, teach strategies to resist pro-drug pressures and establish nondrug-using norms. It includes 11 sessions and has supplemental parent-school involvement sessions.

Lions Quest Skills

This program engages parents, teachers and community members to promote positive youth outcomes such as good citizenship skills, attitudes consistent with a drug-free lifestyle and an ethic of service to others within a caring and consistent environment. The eight unit curriculum can be adapted to a variety of settings and formats from a nine-week mini-course to a three-year program. It includes units on building self-confidence, communication skills, managing emotions in positive ways, improving relationships, and making healthy choices.