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Melaia Kilduff is the Executive Director of PAADA, the Partnership Against Alcohol & Drug Abuse. She brought Jake White from Vive18 to help with her youth substance use prevention efforts.

“PAADA puts on two youth leadership academies a year and we decided this spring it should be more like a celebration and talking about the things that kids can do to make self safe healthy choices. Jake came out and did a great presentation about safe sober parties, and getting together having fun without substances, and being a positive role model for younger kids as well as their peers. The kids responded so well they’re excited they want me to start planning parties for them hahaha. The energy this time (was great), last time kids came and we did workshop, workshop, workshop, and they learned about the dangers of drugs the neurological effects of drugs, how to communicate with peers and it was like going to school.

Today they came in and I watched their body language, just like “All right we’re here for this.” But this time music was playing and there was energy in the room and they were excited to be here, and then they found out “oh this isn’t like drugs are bad” it was “hey let’s do something else, there are options and you can do something better that’s going to be skill building instead of shortcuts!” The kids responded so well and they left energized and motivated to do better things going into the summer that’s an a fantastic feeling know that that they have that in their toolbox.

We had a state representative show up and he’s works with the education budget for our state and he was excited to see a bunch of kids in the room learning about leadership learning about positive safe choices um we also had one of our grant funders here and she was like “How do we get Jake back in Oregon how do we get him back in Lincoln County?” So we were already scheduled a couple more conversations about that. I’m excited to see how it grows.

I would recommend Vive18 to any rural high school. You don’t need a big high school to do this. We had 38 kids here today and those 38 kids are going to go back to each of their high schools and spread the message and spread the energy. This works for anybody you don’t have to be in a big school where everybody’s trying to do the same thing you can be the voice in the smaller community and make a change.”