MACRO POST 4
With this as my last post, I would like to summarize the whole experience of working with JOCO angels. With the making of the presentation and the video for our practicum, we were able to recollect the various thing we participated in and the various message we were able to take home and apply in our lives. Firstly, about JOCO angels, they were a group created by people who lost their near and dear ones to substance abuse. They started this group as an initiative to provide resources and education to young people who are affected by the influence of substances such as prescription opioids, drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, or vaping. Their goals were to raise opioid awareness, prevent opioid abuse, and help those affected with opioid use disorder. With these as their goals, they have joined hands with various faith-based institutions and organizations to raise awareness. They conduct many events on opioid abuse, overdose, and recovery from substance use. Some of the recent event conducted was the overdose awareness day, 12 stones recovery event, and weekly cornerstone teen recovery. We attended a few meetings with the team and discussed their future goal and upcoming events. We also were part of the weekly cornerstone teen recovery event which had discussions, music, and worship. We discussed various topics during the event such as letting go of our baggage and opening up to others and not suppressing our feelings. Our team members also spoke to the members in the group about peer pressure, bad relationships, how to maintain good friendships, and also about situations where saying no is the right option to go for. All these events were very eye-opening and informative and the message given are some things we could utilize in our day-to-day lives. One of the major and important events we worked during our semester was the red ribbon week. During the preparation of the event, we contacted schools, created sample posters, created videos, testimonies, bows (we made 700 which took a lot of time and effort) which symbolized the red ribbon week, emailed our ideas and posters to the schools, and got their approval to conduct the event, we created resource brochures, conducted poster competition and judged them and provided them with a pizza party and ice cream party as the winning prize. We were able to speak with the students and encouraged them to review the event we conducted for them. We received a lot of reviews and suggestions from the students. Some of them were about their struggles with substance use and some were suggestions on how to make the event even better.
Some of the quotes from the kids: “A lot happened over the summer and it ended in me being taken away from my mom and placed with my dad 24 / 7 and a lot that happened during that time could have been prevented by not taking drugs, because drugs rip families, friends, and more apart. because you convince yourself you are fine,that the drugs don't do any harm,i will quit them in a week . But because of that mindset so many young and old people die because of overdosing so this means to me that I hope everyone is one day drug free and I know this poster doesn't do much for that cause but it's a 1 /2 step in the right direction.” “In my opinion it sends out a message on what it can do to you and how bad it can get with drugs. A lot of people fall for it and think it'll be fine but they wont it screws you up. A lot of kids fall for it out of peer pressure but you dont have to do it.” “I couldn't have the prize because it was pizza and ice cream and i'm lactose intolerant. I just felt left out and I feel like they should have had an option for everyone.”
Seeing these quotes from young people makes us feel that we had done something right to help them effectively. Along with educating the teens on substance use and abuse we also learned how to interact and communicate with students, how to communicate with school organizations, collect resources, research the statistics of substance and identify the vulnerable groups and mainly how to be organized and work better in a group. We also were able to realize how some things which we learned during classes were realistically happening and how unaware are people of these public health issues. Some things that shocked me was learning and experiencing that teenager and African Americans were the most vulnerable population to substance abuse and many of the adults who suffer from recovery from substance use are ones who started using substances at a very young age. Some of the positives that came from this experience were to introduce communication with faith-based organizations and opioid recovery-related institutions and also communicating with schools and forming a relationship with them and encouraging them to continue working with JOCO angels and the public health department in educating the students with future events. We wanted to work with the wake monarch academy and also with the high schoolers about substance use and the issues associated with it and also with parents and create videos for how to identify mental health issues with their children and how to look out for their children if they are struggling, about the resources available and mainly educating parents to talk to their children about all these issues openly and freely. But unfortunately, we were unable to connect with them due to Covid-19 restrictions and time constraints. We hope that this initiation will continue and further continue to work with Campbell university in promoting awareness on opioid abuse and recovery.