The Red Ribbon Coalition website features training, information, and resources that will help you coordinate and host a great Red Ribbon Week campaign at your school or in your community. We begin with an introduction to prevention strategies to help you establish a foundation to build your Red Ribbon Week campaign on.

Prevention strategies featured on the Red Ribbon Coalition website include:

• Six Primary Prevention Strategies: These strategies will help you make any Red Ribbon Week activity better! When we host our local training workshops, we always ask our coordinators to include three primary prevention strategies in any Red Ribbon Week activity to strengthen the effort. (We also ask them to do just three things during Red Ribbon Week - but to do them well!)

• Protective Factors: Caring relationships, high expectations, and meaningful participation at home, school, in the community, and with peers increase a young persons capacity to make healthy choices every day. This year's Red Ribbon Weektheme "Dream, Believe, Achieve, Succeed" really is about nurturing the development of these competencies in every child. In fact, we would argue that promoting the development of protective factors should always be an important focus of your Red Ribbon Week campaign (and doing so can be a lot of fun too!) 

• Social Marketing: This strategy utilizes the concepts of marketing to address a variety of health and social issues by promoting the desired positive behaviors to a targeted audience. Since Red Ribbon Week is an awareness campaign, develop ways to promote awareness regarding alcohol, tobacco and other drug and violence prevention utilizing tools like your school website, parent newsletters, emails, that already exist at your school!

• Social Norms Marketing: Based on Social Norms Theory, this strategy seeks to inform the public about the true positive norms of adolescent behavior. The truth is, most young people do not drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, or use other drugs. By promoting the healthy behaviors of young people, social norms marketing reduces alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use.

The Red Ribbon Coalition website will introduce you to all of these concepts - and don't worry, it is pretty easy to do once you have the information.