Alcohol Awareness Month – Tools for Outreach

By Lisa Minjares

On the heels of the Impaired Driving Prevention Symposium, it cannot be stated enough, how vital your efforts are to promote responsible alcohol use and prevent impaired driving among your peers.  In Texas, 29% of all motor vehicle deaths in 2014 were linked to a driver that was under the influence of alcohol¹.  Among these alcohol related fatalities drivers ages 21-25 had the highest percent involvement compared to any other age group of nearly 24%².   It is also estimated that the cost of alcohol impaired crashes is roughly 49.8 billion dollars (annually) and nationally there is 1 fatality every 52 minutes related to impaired driving³.

April is national Alcohol Awareness Month and as peer educators and future community leaders it is important to be aware of the various resources available to use to help amplify efforts aimed at reducing the impact of impaired driving and substance abuse.  U in the Driver Seat recognizes that our resource kit is only one of the many tools in your respective tool kit available for you to use and thus always encourages collaboration with both campus and community partners.

Highlighted in this month’s newsletter is the “Prevent Impaired Driving” online toolkit developed by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) to assist with preventing impaired driving within your community.

“CADCA’s Impaired Driving Prevention Toolkit is designed to provide… strategies to prevent and reduce impaired driving in…communities. The Toolkit offers a variety of strategies aimed at changing or influencing community conditions, standards, institutions, systems and policies. To assist… with assessing and planning… impaired driving prevention efforts, the Toolkit provides links to significant research and top experts in the field, fact sheets, guidelines for data collection, sample logic models, sample intervention maps and success stories to inform decision making and communication.”

For more information on this tool kit please click the links above or visit: www.preventimpaireddriving.org.

1. Texas Department of Transportation, 2015. Texas Motor Vehicle Crash Highlights
2. Texas Department of Transportation, 2015. DUI (Alcohol) Drivers in Fatal Crashes by Driver Age.
3. Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, Impaired Driving Facts At-A-Glance.