Late last week, the Allen County Multi-Agency Team received an important email from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the contents of which did two important things. First, it affirmed the good work the coalition has done in recent years when it comes to combating substance abuse, particularly among the young, in this afflicted section of southeast Kansas. Second, it put its money where its mouth is.
Just over a year ago, ACMAT was awarded a $125,000 Drug-Free Communities (DFC) grant, which stipulated that the coalition would need to reapply for the grant the following year. This would allow funders time to evaluate how successful ACMAT had been in its efforts to curb drug, alcohol and tobacco use in its home county.
The verdict arrived last Friday when ACMAT’s grant coordinator Jaime Westervelt and its chairman, Angela Murphy, learned that the organization was cleared not only for an additional $125,000 for this year, but has been assured receipt of the same annual gift over the course of the next three years.
“It’s a five-year grant, in total” explained Murphy. “But we can also have it renewed for years six through 10. At $125,000 a year over 10 years” — Murphy quickly did the math — “that’s $1.25 million coming in to help Allen County. That’s big.”
The grant extension allows the group — operated exclusively by volunteers since its inception nearly 20 years ago — to have paid staff, which will include Westervelt’s position as well as two new paid contractors, whom ACMAT is currently in the process of hiring.
According to Murphy, ACMAT’s advantage in tackling the area’s steep substance abuse trouble is that it takes, as its name suggests, a broad-based approach to the problem. Drug addiction, as the coalition knows well, has a thousand fathers, and the array of solutions on offer in any one community should reflect that reality.
“Substance abuse goes along with poverty and lack of jobs and lack of transportation and, often, mental illness,” explained Westervelt, who was, in a previous life, a drug and alcohol counselor. “They all weave together. You can’t tackle one problem without addressing the others.”
Which is why ACMAT, in overseeing a targeted youth substance abuse task force in addition to the DFC-funded initiative, has forged partnerships with a variety of area service entities — local law enforcement, the courts, the mental health center, Head Start, the pregnancy resource center, healthy-living nonprofits, domestic violence experts, suicide prevention experts, bullying experts. And perhaps, most importantly, the area schools (Westervelt’s office, in fact, is located inside Iola High School.)
“One thing this grant is allowing us to do,” said Westervelt, “is to educate kids on life skills. We don’t want to just say: ‘Don’t do drugs — it’s bad for you!’ You’ve got to show them how to have healthy relationships, how to handle their emotions and their stress.
“And ACMAT has a longevity plan with everything we do. For example, this first year, we’ll teach the kids these life skills. The next year, we may pilot it in the schools, where the teacher does it. We’ll still provide the curriculum, and we may pay for the teacher to be trained, since, with [state] budget cuts, there is hardly any life-skills training in the schools anymore.”
ACMAT’s positive influence on the community is not merely anecdotal, argue Murphy and Westervelt. Greenbush Service Center, in Girard, monitors the local impact of Kansas-based groups like ACMAT, and its most recent survey, comparing prescription drug abuse in the state between 2014 and 2016, showed a significant dip in Allen County.
According to Murphy, analysts she’s spoken with suspect the improvement is due, at least in part, to ACMAT-led programs like Drug Take Back and to the county’s medicine drop-box locations, and to the many other efforts at education launched by the coalition.
“We stand out there on a Saturday morning,” recalled Murphy, “rain, sleet or snow, and we pass out pamphlets. We try to educate people. We tell people why you don’t put your medicine in the toilet, why you don’t put it in the trash, and just how to dispose of it. All of this matters.”
And while the grant money cheers the hearts of the two ACMAT leaders, it’s the unfailing dedication of the many volunteers over the years that has spelled the group’s real success.
“We were founded in 1999,” explained Murphy, “and, until about two years ago, we never had more than $300 in the bank. But we still managed to find ways to give back to our community. We still helped with Kleenex drives, with diaper drives, with giving blankets to senior citizens — because in Allen County you can always round up the troops.”
And it’s not enough to wait around for an outside entity to arrive in Iola or Moran or Humboldt with its proposed solution, said Westervelt. “They don’t know our community like we do. They know numbers; they don’t know people. How each school district is different, how each community is different, and how they interact. We have to individualize this solution.”
