Empowering Youth & Families Program

EYFP

Pender County 4-H has received grant funds from the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to host a program focusing on opioid prevention education for youth ages 10-14 and their caregivers in rural North Carolina. The goals of our program are to reduce youth substance use in rural North Carolina, to improve parenting skills of caregivers to assist youth in making healthy choices, to improve family relationships, and to empower families to lead community change to leverage support for healthier lifestyles within those communities.

Families participate in 10 weekly sessions at the county level. At the end of the weekly sessions, a family retreat is held at one of North Carolina 4-H's Camps. Families from different counties join together and design community outreach events to impact each county as a whole.

Pender County 4-H finished their first EYFP cohort in December 2019! We had three incredible families that joined us on this journey to strengthen themselves as a family unit and educate the community on the dangers of substance misuse. Each week, we came together to eat dinner. Then, we split up into youth and adult sessions, and, finally, we came back together for a family session.

After completing all 10 sessions, the first cohort held their Community Event(s)! They chose to screen the Resilience film on Thursday, February 13th and invited the community to attend! We had 71 people attend and watch the screening, enjoyed a meal catered by Bandana's, a local restaurant, followed by a panel of experts (Annie Murphy, Pender County DSS, Mebane Boyd, New Hanover Resiliency Task Force, and Tyler Capps, Student Support Specialist for Communities In Schools at Heide Trask High School). All for free! It was a huge success! Part 2 of our Community Event was held on Thursday, March 5th. We hosted another FREE event where we trained 40 members of our community in the Community Resiliency Model (CRM). We are so proud of our first cohort and the great success they had!

We began our spring cohort of the Empowering Youth & Families Program, on February 12th! Unfortunately, we only completed 4 lessons with our three families before restrictions due to COVID-19. We restarted this program in October virtually. Each week, families picked up a free meal at Bandana's, along with all the supplies needed for that night. They then joined us for our sessions via Zoom after eating their Bandana's dinner together as a family! We are had a virtual Confluence in January where we started planning our Community Event! This cohort's community event was held on Saturday, March 27th from 10am-12pm at the Extension Office. It was a drive through event where community organizations gave out food boxes, books, hand sanitizer, masks, resources, and more!

This is a completely FREE 11 week program! We are currently recruiting families for our Spring 2021 cohort. If you want more information, contact the Empowering Youth & Families Program Assistant, Traci Spencer at 910-259-1235 or tjspenc2@ncsu.edu.

*We cannot accept families who are currently in crisis with substance misuse*

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