About the Virginia SEOW
Since 2016, Omni Institute has partnered with Virginia's Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) to lead the Virginia State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup (SEOW).
The SEOW is an action-oriented coalition that connects data leaders across the commonwealth around a shared mission: using data to drive smarter, more effective prevention work. Together, members build lasting partnerships, share resources and findings, and learn from Virginia's brightest data experts.
At its core, the SEOW exists to break down silos, helping agencies pool their expertise, share data openly, and apply best practices that benefit not just their own organizations but communities across Virginia.
Virginia SEOW members are passionate about data and making it useful for everyone, not just researchers. This site was built for prevention professionals like you, whether you work at a Community Services Board, a nonprofit, or a government agency.
Here, you'll find practical tools and strategies to help you tell your community's prevention story in a way that resonates, informs, and inspires action.
We'll guide you through:
Use the tabs at the top of the page to explore each section at your own pace.
Connect with the Virginia SEOW
The Virginia SEOW hosts data trainings and releases new deliverables throughout the year. To keep up-to-date on SEOW events, click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Prevention initiatives hinge on the idea that coordinated interventions can help stop harmful behaviors before they start. Although each individual has a unique experience and risk for behavioral health or substance use concerns, prevention efforts require planning and coordination across federal, state, and local governments; nonprofits; and other community organizations to strategize, implement, test, and analyze what works and what doesn't.
Evidence-based prevention programs are designed to prevent high-risk behaviors and related negative outcomes. These coordinated prevention activities work to educate and support individuals and communities to prevent negative health behaviors such as substance use disorders and mental health conditions before they ever occur. [citation]
- Reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors
- Help people avoid or delay the onset of risky behaviors (e.g., substance use)
- Stop substance use from progressing into higher-risk substance use or a substance use disorder
- Reduce harms related to substance use and misuse and mental health conditions, such as injuries or infections [citation]
Harm reduction incorporates a spectrum of strategies that includes safer use, managed use, abstinence, meeting people who use drugs "where they're at," and addressing conditions of use along with the use itself. [citation]
Harm reduction strategies are implemented to prevent overdose and other negative outcomes related to substance use, such as disease transmissions.
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 the individual and the behavioral health system. You can view prevention as the first line of defense for a community.
Preventive interventions are designed to address three levels of risk: universal, selective, and indicated. [citation]
Universal Interventions
Universal interventions focus on an entire population regardless of individual risk level. Examples include a school-wide prevention program or a national anti-smoking media campaign.
Selective Interventions
Selective interventions focus on groups of people more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors. Example populations include youth, individuals with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), or individuals with a family history of substance use or mental illness. An intervention could look like a program for children whose parents have severe mental illnesses or substance use disorders.
Indicated Interventions
Indicated interventions focus on specific people who already engage in high-risk behaviors. Interventions are intended to prevent additional high-risk behaviors that could lead to future disorders, such as referrals to treatment for youth who have already started using a substance.
There are many potential services and interventions to curb negative behaviors, so it can be helpful to visualize where prevention activities fit when discussing behavioral health topics. Behavioral health professionals place services on a continuum of care.
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. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) uses this framework to classify programs. [citation]
Prevention lies on the left side of the continuum (along with health promotion) with the hope of limiting the number of individuals who require treatment and recovery services later on.
The Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) developed six major prevention strategy categories for effective prevention. These categories are:
📢 Information Dissemination
Information dissemination, such as communication campaigns use targeted prevention messages aimed at raising awareness, reducing stigma, and stopping dangerous behaviors, often focusing on youth and parental education. Information Dissemination often include several components including social media posts, tv ads, billboards, and distributable materials.
🎓 Education
Education strategies aim at training professionals and community members on prevention topics and share strategies and best practices they can use in their own work or in their day-to-day lives. Education programs aim to improve critical life and social skills, including decision-making, refusal skills, critical analysis, and systematic judgment abilities. Educational programs can also help educate on warning signs for substance use and mental health-related risks such as self-harm and suicide.
🌱 Alternatives
Alternative strategies help to prevent substance use by providing spaces and activities free of substances. These programs can include substance-free social and recreational activities for youth, community centers where individuals can spend their free time, mentoring programs, volunteer opportunities, or after-school clubs.
🔍 Problem Identification and Referral
Problem identification and referral strategies are focused on individuals who have experimented with substances and work to reverse dangerous behaviors through educational programs before they develop into a substance use disorder. Identified individuals are referred to preventative services to reverse their behaviors through early intervention.
🤝 Community-Based Processes
Community-based processes share your work with a large audience through community events. Whether extensive, like a prevention resource fair or more simple like a booth at a farmer's market, these events can get prevention professionals away from their offices and into the community where they can share their work with a new audience. Community-based processes can also include coalition building that brings different agencies, community members, business owners, nonprofits, and local officials together to build partnerships and share resources and strategies for large-scale change. Coalitions work toward common goals determined through strategic planning processes. Coalitions help add voices to the conversation and improve trust and collaboration across diverse partners.
🏛️ Environmental
Environmental strategies focus not on the natural environment, but the community environment including policy, regulations, norms, and physical surrounding. Environmental strategies involve working with legislators, law enforcement, and other community leaders. Examples include updating laws and ordinances, increasing enforcement of existing laws limiting sales of alcohol and tobacco, and hosting drug take-back events.
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 high-risk behaviors in the future.
What makes something evidence-based?
Evidence-based strategies are those that have been rigorously tested for effectiveness. Tests can include research studies, clinical trials, and reviews of existing research. [citation] Before they are considered evidence-based, experts test the effectiveness across a variety of contexts to show that their outcomes are repeatable and work across different communities. Evidence-based prevention strategies have shown the ability to reduce risks of dangerous behaviors and improve outcomes of those who have participated. Most strategies are designed to be delivered in specific settings, to specific age groups, and to specific populations.
It's always advised to implement evidence-based strategies so resources are being used on the most effective programs and so your communities can have the greatest outcomes. This doesn't mean that new strategies won't eventually become evidence-based. Research continues to evolve, and new programs may be found to be evidence-based after testing.
Evidence-based strategies across Virginia
Below are examples of evidence-based strategies currently used in Virginia prevention efforts. Click on a strategy to learn more about it.
1. ACEs Trainings
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are neglectful, abusive, or harmful situations caused by one's family or the environment during childhood. ACE Interface instructors from across Virginia are working together to raise awareness through education and to connect people to helpful resources in an effort to reduce adverse childhood experiences and ultimately improve the overall health and well-being of our communities. Register for a training here or contact the CSB in your area to bring the training to your organization.
2. Drug Take Back Programs
Drug take-back programs provide safe and confidential ways to safely dispose of unused or expired prescription and non-prescription medications so that they are not misused by someone else. Drug take-back programs may provide permanent medication-disposal drop boxes or may also set up drug take-back events with temporary locations for medication disposal. In Virginia, you can dispose of unused, unwanted, or expired medications year-round at permanent drop boxes located in police stations, pharmacies (like CVS and Walgreens), and hospitals. Learn more about Virginia Take Back Programs here: Attorney General Jay Jones.
3. LifeSkills Training (Botvin)
Botvin LifeSkills Training (LST) is a research-validated substance abuse prevention program proven to reduce the risks of alcohol, tobacco, drug abuse, and violence by targeting the major social and psychological factors that promote the initiation of substance use and other risky behaviors. Rather than merely teaching information about the dangers of substance abuse, Botvin LifeSkills Training promotes healthy alternatives to risky behavior through activities designed to:
- Teach students the necessary skills to resist social (peer) pressures to smoke, drink, and use drugs
- Help students to develop greater self-esteem and self-confidence
- Enable students to effectively cope with anxiety
- Increase their knowledge of the immediate consequences of substance abuse
- Enhance cognitive and behavioral competency to reduce and prevent a variety of health risk behaviors
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.
4. Lock and Talk
Lock & Talk is a suicide prevention initiative in Virginia that strives to encourage community conversation around mental wellness and promote safe care of lethal means, including firearms and medications. Lock and Talk provides:
- Suicide prevention education
- Mental health wellness education
- Community training
- Access to resources
- Medication lock boxes
- Trigger and cable locks
5. Mental Health First Aid
Mental Health First Aid teaches how to help a loved one who may be struggling. Through this training, participants learn how to recognize, understand, and respond to signs of mental health or substance use challenges — and offer the first level of support. Find an upcoming training here.
- 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. The training gives you the skills you need to reach out and provide initial help and support to someone who may be developing a mental health or substance use problem or experiencing a crisis.
- Youth MHFA is designed for adults who regularly interact with young people. Similar in format to the Adult MHFA, it focuses on mental health, crisis management, and substance abuse in adolescents and youth.
6. REVIVE! Trainings
REVIVE! is the Opioid Overdose and Naloxone Education (OONE) program for the Commonwealth of Virginia. REVIVE! provides training on how to recognize and respond to an opioid overdose emergency using naloxone. Learn more here.
7. Safe TALK
SafeTALK is a four-hour face-to-face workshop that can be taken online or in person. It teaches participants how to prevent suicide by recognizing signs, engaging someone, and connecting them to an intervention resource for further support.
8. Too Good for Drugs school trainings
Too Good for Drugs is a K-12 school-based prevention program designed to enhance resilience and reduce substance use risks by building social and emotional competencies. It teaches skills like decision-making, positive relationship building, self-efficacy, communication, and resisting peer pressure. It also promotes a nonviolent, drug-free lifestyle, and educates participants about the harmful effects of drug use through developmentally appropriate activities. Learn more here.
9. Compliance Checks
Compliance checks are performed to ensure that local businesses adhere to laws. For example, an underage buyer may attempt to purchase alcohol at a retailer or restaurant to see if the establishment follows the law or illegally sells to a minor. Violations can lead to penalties, criminal charges, or license suspension. The Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) Authority conducts compliance checks.
Now we've established what prevention is and how prevention programs might show up in a community. But let's be frank, money talks, and sometimes people only want to know if it's worth their investment. In this section, we'll break down how to understand prevention's return on investment and how prevention programs reduce the burden on systems and drive down associated costs. We'll also demonstrate how you can use research on estimated costs savings to show impact as you're applying for grants and speaking to funders, legislators, and concerned community members.
The costs of substance use on a community are very high and can be seen across sectors. Substance use costs stem from various sources, including healthcare services, criminal justice system expenses, lost worker productivity, and the value of lives lost to overdose. [citation]
We all know the devastating effects the opioid crisis has had on Virginia's families. The economic costs of the opioid epidemic are also quite staggering. Together, these impacts warrant the funding and effort that has been put into prevention efforts to reduce the number of people who develop Opioid Use Disorder (OUD). Data below comes from 2023: [citation]
By reducing the number of individuals with an OUD, prevention programs help reduce the associated costs. How can you connect the work you're doing with the above costs? How can you use these costs to help improve understanding for the importance of prevention programs?
The cost of mental health inequities [citation] is quite shocking! According to a study done by the Meharry School of Global Health, $477.5 billion is spent annually in avoidable or unnecessary U.S. spending linked to mental health inequities. The spending could exceed $1.3 trillion by 2040. [citation]
Prevention programs focused on mental health help individuals build protective factors and reduce risk factors that can lead to improved mental health outcomes in the future, thus reducing mental health-related costs. How have you seen the costs of mental health inequities in your community? How can you use these costs to help improve understanding for the importance of prevention programs?
Return on Investment (ROI) is a calculation used to determine how beneficial an investment is. For the amount of money I put in, how much money am I getting out? Below you'll find the ROI of certain prevention programs that have been researched, showing how one dollar invested can save in return. That's quite the impact!
ROI of evidence-based prevention programming
In the last section, we discussed evidence-based prevention programming (EBPs) available in Virginia. Below are a few cost savings figures for EBPs [citation].
| Program | Investment | Benefit | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| LifeSkills Training (Botvin) | $1 spent | $14 benefit | 14× |
| Strengthening Families Program | $1 spent | $5 benefit | 5× |
| Too Good for Drugs | $1 spent | $10 benefit | 10× |
Prevention can sometimes feel intangible for those not involved in the day-to-day work. And for those providing the investment, it's helpful to demonstrate impact with data-backed dollar figures. Help quantify the great work you're doing with economic data.
Use Cost Savings Data to add evidence to the work you are doing
When you're seeking additional funding, make it really obvious that prevention saves money! Help funders understand the many ways prevention work can impact sectors such as health care, labor, and, most importantly, people's lives. Below are just some examples of how you can promote your work using cost savings data.
Talking to legislators
Legislators want to know if the money they may direct to prevention work is making a difference. Include cost savings data when talking to legislators. Add evidence for the cost to the community. Those not affected by substance use/mental health struggles or those who don't work in public or behavioral health may not understand the magnitude of the cost and could be more persuaded to support prevention efforts if they understand the cost savings.
Grant Applications
Include cost savings data in grant funding applications to show the importance of cost savings throughout the public sector and how a dollar spent in prevention can impact not just an individual's health outcomes, but the community as a whole.
Community Partners and Leadership
Even community partners and leadership who have strong buy-in for non-financial reasons can be impacted by the financial benefits of prevention programs. Providing the cost savings can help improve the chance of receiving local funding and increase program sustainability.
In the next section, we'll show how to include data in reporting and how to tell a compelling story around the impact of prevention. Cost savings data can be a powerful tool in your story telling, adding unmistakable proof of not only the devastating costs of behavioral health crises on your community, but the profound effect your work has on reducing costs while improving outcomes.
To tell your data story you need…DATA! Data is a broad term, but 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
When you think of data, you're probably thinking about quantitative data. Quantitative data are represented numerically. They include 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.
There are two data collection methods to get quantitative data:
- Primary data are collected through original research, such as surveys.
- Secondary data are gathered from existing sources like dashboards, reports, or databases.
Qualitative Data
Qualitative data characterize information and concepts that are not represented by numbers and focus on individual or group experiences. The goal of presenting qualitative data is to show how people are personally impacted. Qualitative data are especially helpful for prevention work because they help provide context, personal stories, and richer details.
Quantitative
Determine what kinds of quantitative data can help you provide answers to your questions. Below are tools and resources for collecting quantitative data.
- Equitable and Accessible Data-Sharing Guide — This document, developed in the context of Virginia's statewide epidemiological work, is designed to empower you with practical education, guidance, and checklists. The concepts discussed are relevant and applicable to any work in the public health space.
- Virginia Data Finder — The Virginia Data Finder is your go-to search tool for discovering reliable data sources from Virginia government agencies. The Virginia Data Finder is a tool for researchers, policymakers, CSBs, and community advocates, that empowers you to easily access public and behavioral health data to inform your work and support your community. Search by category and topic area to find relevant secondary data to help tell your story!
- VASIS — The Virginia Social Indicator Summary (VASIS) website includes a compilation of public and behavioral health-related data dashboards. Explore the website to view the dashboards. Links to all VASIS dashboards are also available through the Virginia Data Finder.
Qualitative
Think about the different qualitative sources you can collect that will bring your data to life. Below is a list of qualitative sources.
Interviews and focus groups
Develop a set of questions you hope to answer. Then bring together relevant individuals, whether that's staff, clients, or community members, to hear their perspectives. You can use quotes or summarized themes from these sessions to add additional perspectives in your story.
Client quotes and success stories
If you are building a client or community survey, include open-ended questions where you allow participants to enter their personal experiences or success stories. Quotes and success stories don't need to be collected formally. Perhaps someone sent an email or a letter sharing how your work changed their lives. Save these to share in future reports.
Art Projects
Collecting art projects from community members can provide a unique perspective and understanding of the populations you study. Art created by those with living experiences brings feelings to life in a way that data points simply can't and allows participants to express themselves outside of traditional methods. View examples here: ODP Art Challenge: How Prevention Can Create Better Health for Everyone
Photovoice
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 more creative means, allowing audiences to view their situations from a different light.
Community Mapping & Asset Mapping Workshops
In community mapping and asset mapping workshops, participants create visual maps of community strengths, barriers, service access points, or social networks. Mapping can help visualize the tangible and intangible resources such as social networks and how people and resources are connected. Rooted in the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model, asset mapping prioritizes what communities have rather than what they lack. [citation]
Story Circles
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 of participants and allow for free expression without interruption.
Other Imagery
Images can also be used to support your story. These can include photos taken at events, prevention-related art projects or photo voice, or visuals such as word clouds.
Humanizing data and the impact of personal experiences
When problems are large, such as the magnitude of the opioid crisis, people involved tend to be grouped together into a single monolith. Data can feel overwhelming and hard to wrap your head around. All of those millions of people have stories, and those stories create a larger impact than any one fact.
Add individual success stories to your reporting
One of the best parts about working in community prevention, is seeing first-hand how your work impacts individuals. Don't keep these stories to yourself! Share with your community how lives have changed from your work. To do this well:
- Be specific and show the line between your prevention efforts and their improved outcomes
- Embed the stories within your narrative to help show the cause and effect
Building the Story — Step by Step
Take the time you need to craft your story. Follow the steps below to build a compelling story.
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/donors, or clients. Sometimes this means creating multiple versions of the same data story.
Know Your Audience's Priorities
- What did their investments pay for?
- How does their community compare to others?
- Is there data to back up what they've heard anecdotally?
- Are current strategies and interventions working?
Once you have your data and your story, it's time to determine the best way to share this information. Explore the options below to find the right format for your audience.
Now it's time to put everything together to tell your story! In this section, we'll use a fictional example to demonstrate how a local community agency can use data to create an impactful deliverable.
Determine your goal: What do you hope to achieve by sharing information?
New Virginia CSB's goal is to secure additional grant funding to expand its new prevention program aimed at reducing the use of vapes in youth and young adults.
Determine your audience: Tailor your story to the audience.
New Virginia CSB's audience is a local funder that put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) for youth substance use prevention.
What are your audiences' priorities and interests?
- They want to know how the community is impacted by the problem addressed in the application (is vaping a large enough problem to need additional funding to combat it?)
- They want to know if the strategies and interventions already in place are helping
- They want to know that funding this program will have a high rate of return for their investment
New Virginia CSB knows that they need the data to back up their claims so they build out a mixed-methods approach to gather quantitative and qualitative data to best show the whole picture.
Virginia Data Finder
They search for vaping on the Virginia Data Finder and find the Young Adult Survey VASIS dashboard. Here they're able to pull data for their region and compare it to other regions and Virginia as a whole. They find the following important quantitative data points:
Creating a Training Survey
As part of their multi-year youth prevention campaign against vaping, New Virginia CSB hosted trainings in local middle and high schools. To understand how opinions changed, New Virginia CSB had participants fill out a pre- and post- survey. Below are some of the quantitative and qualitative responses they received:
Quotes from students in their post survey:
"I thought vaping was ok because it's just vapor. I didn't realize it was actually making you sick."
"My friends started vaping but I didn't say anything because I thought it was better than using other things. I want them to stop now."
"My parents vape. They told me it's fine but now I know it's not."
Hosting a focus group
Following the training, students were able to sign up for a focus group, during which New Virginia CSB staff could dive deeper into how youth felt about vaping. Key takeaways included:
- Youth feel like everyone at their school is vaping, and predicted higher percentages than the survey would indicate
- Youth feel like vaping is still a healthier option than using other substances
- Youth feel like it's really hard to stop vaping once they start
- Youth feel more comfortable telling their peers to stop vaping after the training
- Youth see a lot of adults vaping so it feels like it's not that dangerous
Having an art contest
New Virginia CSB staff were really impressed with the openness of the students they talked to and hosted an art contest for students to creatively share how they feel about vaping. They were excited to receive several submissions and awarded a gift card to the winner. All submissions are being displayed in the local community center.
Finding the Cost and ROI of Vaping Prevention Programs
New Virginia CSB wanted to bolster their findings with ROI data to show the impact of their programs on students and the community. They found the following data they can use:
New Virginia CSB has collected a lot of different data points and now it's time to connect the dots! Below are ways they can craft their story:
"I thought vaping was ok because it's just vapor. I didn't realize it was actually making you sick." — Training participant
"My parents vape. They told me it's fine but now I know it's not." — Training participant
"My friends started vaping but I didn't say anything because I thought it was better than using other things. I want them to stop now." — Training participant
New Virginia CSB feels confident in the story they can tell about their youth vaping prevention program in their attempt at receiving additional funding to expand.
Grant Application
In the application they:
- Set the stage by sharing information about the importance of prevention
- Framed the problem around vaping including the cost of vaping and ROI of the youth training program.
- Used data from the Virginia Young Adult Survey and their pre- and post- training surveys to show the prevalence of vaping in the community
- Used data from the pre- and post- training surveys to show attitude shifts among participants
- Showed the correlation between increased evidence-based prevention programming aimed at youth vaping and the reduction in vaping among young adults and high school students.
Community Event and One-Pager
New Virginia CSB wanted to share these new findings with the whole community! Along with the grant application, New Virginia CSB created a community presentation to host at the opening of the art contest display at the community center.
In addition to the presentation, which included the data they gathered, they invited training participants to share how the training changed their thoughts on vaping and their new understanding around the dangers of vaping.
At the event, New Virginia CSB shared a one-pager with attendees that summarized all of the findings.
This site provides a roadmap for building out your prevention story. What programs do you wish to promote and how will you use data to show impact?