The M.A.S.H. Coalition is a substance abuse prevention coalition. Which means we help to mobilize the community to take action to help prevent drug abuse. We work closely with the City, law enforcement, schools, local businesses, community residents, and other civic organizations.
We are made of up a small number of paid staff and lots of volunteers. Organizationally, we have a Board of Directors who are responsible for over all coalition governance, 4 standing committees whose members work with paid staff to conduct day-to-day business and an Advisory Board who help provide data, perspective on current issues and community engagement.
The 4 standing committees are:
Youth Committee: Includes a peer leadership approach to change the rules, to make it "cool" to be drug free, and to reverse the peer pressure and other influences that often push youth toward using or selling drugs. This committee will work directly with the local youth groups to empower them to achieve their goals and to assist the peer leaders in their social norm campaigns, events/activities and other projects of the coalition and youth groups. Training the youth to be active advocates on policy issues is also a goal of this committee.
Safer Neighborhood: They work with local block watch programs, law enforcement and other civic organizations to address safety issues in the community. Often times crime rates and drug use have direct correlations to each other. Helping to keep crime rates down also helps to keep drug use rates down.
Volunteer/Recruitment: One of the most important committees we have. They are responsible for finding new volunteers, keeping our existing volunteers engaged and finding creative ways to show our volunteers they are appreciated.
PR and Media: Task with making sure the Coalition is consistently in the news and that we have a positive presence in the community. They work with paid staff to market upcoming events.
Collectively we all work toward the following objectives:
Committee leaders (also called commitee chairs) are also members of the Board of Directors and are responsible for carrying out the mission of each individual commitee. They report back successes and obstacles to the Board of Direcors, then as a collective team we work toward more successes.
Meeting happen all throughout the month, check our calendar for current times.
We are making big updates to our website. Some links may temporariliy be disabled and not work. Please be patient while we make these updates!