Understanding Prevention
How prevention strategies protect individuals and communities from the harms of substance use and mental health conditions.
What is Prevention?
Prevention activities work to educate and support individuals and communities to prevent negative health behaviors such as substance use disorders and mental health conditions.1 The goal of prevention programs is to prevent negative behaviors from ever occurring.
Continuum of Care
The concept of the continuum of care refers to the Institute of Medicine's classification system that organizes and defines the wide scope of behavioral services — from promotion to prevention, treatment, and recovery. SAMHSA uses this framework to classify programs.2 Prevention lies at the beginning of the continuum, with the hope of limiting the number of individuals who require treatment and recovery services later on.
How Does Prevention Work?
Preventive interventions are designed to address three levels of risk: universal, selective, and indicated.3
Whole Population
Focuses on an entire population regardless of individual risk level — such as a whole community, school, or neighborhood.
Higher-Risk Groups
Targets groups more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors — such as youth, individuals with ACEs, or those with a family history of substance use.
Specific Individuals
Focuses on people who already engage in high-risk behaviors, aiming to prevent additional behaviors that could lead to future disorders.
Why is Prevention Important?
Prevention strategies work to stop individuals from engaging in high-risk behaviors, protecting them from the negative consequences of those behaviors. Successful prevention mitigates the need for future treatment or recovery services, reducing the burden on both the individual and the behavioral health system.
How Prevention Shows Up in a Community
Prevention strategies can take many forms across a community:
Youth Focus: Many prevention strategies are focused on connecting with youth to help shape their understanding of the dangers of high-risk behaviors — and give them the tools to avoid those behaviors in the future.
Evidence-Based Prevention Strategies
Evidence-based prevention programs are designed to prevent high-risk behaviors and related negative outcomes. Most strategies are delivered in specific settings, to specific age groups, and to specific populations. Prevention programs may aim to:
- Reduce risk factorsRisk factors are characteristics that increase the likelihood of substance use or mental health conditions — such as trauma, poverty, or family history. and enhance protective factorsProtective factors are conditions or attributes that reduce the negative impact of risk — such as strong social support, resilience, and community connection.
- Help people avoid or delay the onset of drug use
- Stop substance use from progressing into higher-risk use or a substance use disorder
- Reduce harms related to substance use, misuse, and mental health conditions4
What Makes Something Evidence-Based?
Evidence-based strategies are those that have been rigorously tested for effectiveness through research studies, clinical trials, and reviews of existing research.5
Below are examples of evidence-based strategies currently used in Virginia's prevention efforts. Click on a strategy to learn more.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are neglectful, abusive, or harmful situations caused by one's family or environment during childhood. ACE Interface instructors from across Virginia are working together to raise awareness through education and to connect people to helpful resources — reducing adverse childhood experiences and improving community health and well-being.
Compliance checks ensure that local businesses adhere to laws. For example, an underage buyer may attempt to purchase alcohol at a retailer to see if the establishment follows the law. Violations can lead to penalties, criminal charges, or license suspension. The Virginia ABC Authority conducts compliance checks.
Drug take-back programs provide safe and confidential ways to dispose of unused or expired medications. In Virginia, you can dispose of medications year-round at permanent drop boxes located in police stations, pharmacies (like CVS and Walgreens), and hospitals.
Botvin LifeSkills Training (LST) is a research-validated substance abuse prevention program that reduces the risks of alcohol, tobacco, drug abuse, and violence by targeting the major social and psychological factors that promote substance use initiation.
The Virginia Department of Education created an opioid education plan funded by the Opioid Abatement Authority that uses the Botvin LifeSkills curriculum to provide prevention instruction across K–12 divisions in the Commonwealth.
Lock & Talk is a Virginia suicide prevention initiative that encourages community conversation around mental wellness and promotes safe care of lethal means, including firearms and medications. It provides suicide prevention education, mental health wellness education, community training, medication lock boxes, and trigger and cable locks.
Adult MHFA is an 8-hour course that teaches you how to identify, understand, and respond to signs of mental illnesses and substance use disorders — giving you skills to reach out and provide initial help to someone experiencing a crisis.
Youth MHFA is designed for adults who regularly interact with young people. It focuses on mental health, crisis management, and substance abuse in adolescents and youth.
REVIVE! is Virginia's Opioid Overdose and Naloxone Education (OONE) program, providing training on how to recognize and respond to an opioid overdose emergency using naloxone.
SafeTALK is a four-hour workshop (available online or in-person) that teaches participants how to prevent suicide by recognizing signs, engaging someone who may be at risk, and connecting them to an intervention resource for further support.
Too Good for Drugs is a K-12 school-based prevention program that enhances resilience and reduces substance use risks by building social and emotional competencies — including decision-making, positive relationship building, self-efficacy, communication, and resisting peer pressure.
Return on Investment
Understanding the economic case for prevention — and how one dollar invested can multiply into significant community benefit.
What is Return on Investment?
Return on Investment (ROI) is a calculation used to determine how beneficial an investment is — for the amount of money put in, how much money is returned?
Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a process for understanding, measuring, and reporting the social, economic, and environmental value created by an intervention, program, policy, or organization.1 SROI looks at the cost savings and economic benefit of investing public funds into programming.
Substance use costs stem from various sources, including healthcare services, criminal justice expenses, lost worker productivity, and the value of lives lost to overdose.2
Cost of the Opioid Epidemic in Virginia (2023)
To better understand the SROI of prevention work, let's first look at the cost of the Opioid Epidemic for Virginia in 2023.3
Cost of Mental Health Inequities
According to a study by the Meharry School of Global Health, the cost of mental health inequities is significant and growing.4
The Cost Savings Power of Prevention
Now let's look at how prevention programming pays off. Below is the ROI of select prevention strategies — showing how one dollar invested multiplies into meaningful economic benefit.
ROI of Evidence-Based Programs in Virginia
How to Use ROI to Promote Prevention Work
Money talks! Help quantify the great work you're doing with ROI data. Prevention can sometimes feel intangible for those not involved in the day-to-day work — data-backed dollar figures make the case clear.
Legislators hold the purse strings and want to know if money spent on prevention is making a difference. Include ROI when speaking with legislators — add evidence for the cost to the community. Those not directly affected by substance use or mental health struggles may be more persuaded to support prevention efforts when they understand the tangible return on investment.
Include ROI in grant funding applications to show the importance of cost savings throughout the public sector. A dollar invested in prevention has a trickle-down effect that benefits everyone — help funders understand how prevention impacts not just an individual's health outcomes, but the community as a whole.
Data Collection & Storytelling
How to collect the right data, find your story, and share it in a way that connects with your audience and drives change.
Data Collection
To tell your data story, you need data! We'll break down what kinds of data you should be collecting, how to find it, how to organize it, and how to share it in a way that connects with your audience and highlights main takeaways.
📊 Quantitative Data
Represented numerically — anything that can be counted, measured, or given a numerical value. Think counts of people, percentages of a population, or the number of services provided.
💬 Qualitative Data
Characterizes information and concepts not represented by numbers, focusing on individual or group experiences. Especially helpful for providing context, personal stories, and richer details.
Example: Quantitative data can describe the demographic information of a studied population — helping determine if survey participants are representative, and revealing differences and disparities among populations.
There are two data collection methods for quantitative data: Primary data, collected through original research such as surveys, and Secondary data, gathered from existing sources like dashboards, reports, or databases.
Finding & Collecting the Data
Quantitative Resources
Qualitative Sources — Click each to learn more:
Develop a set of questions you hope to answer, then bring together relevant individuals — staff, clients, or community members — to hear their perspectives. Use quotes or summarized themes from these sessions to add additional perspectives to your story.
Include open-ended questions in client or community surveys to collect personal experiences. Quotes and success stories don't have to be collected formally — perhaps someone sent an email or letter sharing how your work changed their life. Save these to share in future reports.
Collecting art projects from community members provides a unique perspective on the populations you study. Art created by those with living experiences brings feelings to life in a way that data points simply can't — allowing participants to express themselves outside of traditional methods.
Photovoice is a data collection method in which participants take photos representing their lived experiences. Similar to art projects, photovoice allows individuals to promote awareness and share experiences through creative means, giving audiences a new perspective on their situations.
Participants create visual maps of community strengths, barriers, service access points, or social networks. Rooted in the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model, asset mapping prioritizes what communities have rather than what they lack.1
In story circles, small groups share structured narratives around a specific prompt, with equal time for each participant. Story circles help researchers understand shared and unique experiences while allowing for free expression without interruption.
Building Your Story
Take the time you need to craft your story. Follow the steps below to build a compelling narrative.
Determine Your Goal
What do you hope to achieve by sharing information? Is it to inform, persuade, or celebrate milestones?
Determine Your Audience
Tailor your story to the audience — community members, legislators, funders, or clients. Sometimes this means creating multiple versions of the same data to match different needs.
Know Their Priorities
What does your audience care about? They may want to know what their investments paid for, whether their community is uniquely impacted, or whether current strategies are working.
Humanize the Data
Add individual success stories to your reporting. Be specific and show the line between your prevention efforts and improved outcomes. Embed stories within your narrative to show cause and effect.
Ways to Present Your Story
Reports are a tried-and-true method of sharing your story in a structured and easy-to-follow way. To make them engaging: include a variety of visuals (graphs, charts, quote boxes), weave quantitative data together with qualitative responses, and make the connection clear between what data shows and how people feel.
Stories only have impact if they're heard! Share your work face-to-face with your audience. Examples include Gallery Walks — where findings are displayed in a community space like a gallery — and Presentations with staff and community members sharing personal experiences.
Videos: Create long or short-form video content to share on a website or social media — including informational presentations, community member interviews, and scripted Q&As.
Podcasts: Reach out to relevant local podcasts or radio shows to get a segment or interview about your work. This medium is already geared toward impactful storytelling and can help you reach a larger audience.