Could your marketing protect people from alcohol and drug misuse?

Public Health England estimates that drug and alcohol harm costs the UK £36.4 billion every year - including £4 billion in NHS costs alone - yet we barely spend anything trying to prevent this catastrophe. And the NHS spends only 4% of its total budget on preventing ill health, which is why this month we are featuring the important work of Mentor UK.

Mentor is the UK’s authoritative voice in building resilience and preventing drug and alcohol misuse among children and young people.

They work to ensure that every child in the UK receives sufficient alcohol and drug prevention knowledge in school, parents have free access to the best information and support to help them protect their children from alcohol and drug harms, and policy makers prioritise prevention and early intervention.
 
Michael O’Toole, Chief Executive of Mentor UK, said, “No magic bullet can prevent a young person experimenting with alcohol or drugs but we work to create a prevention ecosystem, which increases protective factors and reduces risks.

“Mentor advocates for programmes that have been proven by hard evidence to change young people's attitudes and behaviour to alcohol and drugs and to reengage them in education, training, volunteering and work.”

As a prevention charity, their work is all about reducing future needs. They want to shift resources from approaches which have been shown not to work to ones that do. And their evidence has shown that attempting to scare young people away from drugs is simply a waste of time and money.

One of the central themes underpinning their work is building children and young people's resilience to negative risks - that is, their ability to navigate and overcome potentially harmful situations and avoid dangerous risk-taking, without sacrificing potentially enriching 'positive risks' (such as skydiving or participating in athletic events).

Mentor runs a variety of projects for different groups of young people and the adults in their lives. Examples of their projects include: resources for those working in drug and alcohol education and prevention, programmes that support youth offenders and kinship carers, and the Good Behaviour Game that helps children learn how to work together to create positive change.

Marketing support needed

If you’d like to help Mentor UK they are currently looking for support with developing creative campaign ideas to raise the profile of their work in 2017.

In the past they have focused on working closely with government to deliver programmes that are effective. But they now feel it’s the right time to do more to engage with individual supporters and potential partners as well.

Would you like to work with Mentor to develop a marketing campaign to help prevent alcohol and drug misuse? If you’re interested in getting involved please email Anna Mullenneaux, Chief Matchmaker at Pimp My Cause, at [email protected].