Blog

Zion Givens from Vive18 was brought out to work with high schoolers for substance use prevention presentations. “Frank Page, principal here at East Long Meadow High School. So we’re in East L. Meadow Mass, is a suburb of Springfield Massachusetts, small little city outside of Boston.

So what we were looking for is just somebody who can connect with their kids and talk to them about what they’re dealing with day to day and also how to navigate some of these different social situations. Because I think the reality that we see with our students is, I mean, it goes back when we were kids, people use teenagers, you know, they use marijuana, alcohol. Today it’s babes, back in the day it cigarettes.

So, how to navigate these conversations and find other ways to deal with stress, decision making, all that stuff. So we came across you guys, it was a recommendation from one of our parents. And it seemed like the right message to send to our kids and help them make some of these decisions. I’ll say the two biggest things we were looking for is one engagement, know, two just the right messaging. Vive18 had that. Anytime we have an assembly in the auditorium, I get nervous. You put 800 kids in one space and you always have that group who can be knuckleheads, which can set a tone negatively. It just makes you nervous. I thought it was a great presentation. You connected with the kids. You got some of the kids who sometimes can be fools to lock in, listen to what you had to say with the conversation. That’s what we’re looking for.

So my hope is that message around skill set and making those decisions that add to that skill set and not those things that are shortcuts or distractions. I think the thing that we’ve often seen, so there’s a youth advisory board that the district attorney’s office runs. It’s throughout Hampton County, it’s all the surrounding communities. And a lot of times, their presentations will come in and go through the cold hard facts. And sometimes I don’t think it’s intended to be threats, but you’ll see things like their programming where you know, there’s some harsh realities that are shared. Even with the stories that you guys shared today, it was more, you know, like the cop showed up. So it was right. It was more about you didn’t miss anything, but there wasn’t that, you know, that person at the end who may have died or been arrested or those harsh realities of some of the other scare tactics you might see in some of these other presentations.

We’ve had those before and they have their message and I think they’re good, but you guys also have an alternative message of how to approach this type of stuff because we really value working with the youth advisory and having them come in and do their presentations, but it’s also good to hear a different way of kind of looking at some of their stuff.”