TAKE FIVE!

December 08, 2020

Jenny Sanchez:
Hello, I’m Jenny Sanchez. Welcome to Sullivan 180 Presents Take Five!. Our guest today is Tom Bosket from Cornell Cooperative Extension of Sullivan County, Sullivan Allies Leading Together, otherwise known as SALT and ENGN. Tom, thank you for joining me.

Tom Bosket:
Thanks for having me, Jenny, always,

Jenny Sanchez:
Could you please introduce yourself?

Tom Bosket:
Sure. I’ve been an artist and I would say civically engaged educator for about 25 years now. And that’s what led to all these sort of crisscrosses of Cornell Cooperative Sullivan Allies Leading Together and ENGN, which is a civic creative center or practice in Calicoon New York. I’ve been involved in creative endeavors my whole life, and that just means less commercial, more civic and less destructive and more about developing things or building them up, lifting us up.

Jenny Sanchez:
So today we’re talking about the work you’re doing through the drug-free communities grant, can you tell us more about the main goals of this program and some of the work you’re doing now?

Tom Bosket:
Sure. The main, the main criteria for the drug-free communities grant is to establish a coalition that is aimed at reducing underage substance use in Sullivan County. And I think it’s around 5,000 coalitions are funded throughout the United States that exist. I didn’t understand it really in the beginning, but it’s aimed at prevention, which a lot of people don’t hear about because usually we hear somebody already has a problem and then we intervene and treat the problem. So you hear about interventions and treatments, but you don’t hear about prevention because when you prevent a problem, you don’t have a problem. And so prevention efforts have been things like education, raising opportunities, so that there’s more opportunities for youth that stack the odds in their favor to make choices that might be better for the long run than short-term decisions that there’s a reason we say people do drugs or engage in drugs can be coffee and alcohol and sugar and a lot of things. But when we engage in things that aren’t optimal for the long run, we all might engage in them, but we know that we don’t want to have that all the time. And so how do we find supportive structures that make it easier to do the better things for yourself rather than the worst things? So those are the types of things we engage in here, increasing the perception of harm, the knowledge of dangers involved with underage, nonmedical marijuana and alcohol use and increasing pro-social activities, which is another word I never knew pro-social versus antisocial. Antisocial I heard all the time, but pro social, I never heard. And pro social is anything that again is just better for you than worse.

Jenny Sanchez:
So how are you doing this work?

Tom Bosket:
In prevention work is long-term. When I first read the statistics on how much things change, you might aim for 2 to 5% change over a year or two. And I was like, wow, that doesn’t seem like much, but in the health world, public health world, a 5% change is huge because if you look at it over time and you think of decades and you’re changing 5%, you have things happen. Like our awareness around smoking our perception has shifted. So the work to do that was changing laws and awareness and supporting people in their effort to quit. And a lot of things played into that. And so right now we’re doing things like, we’ve outreached to law enforcement and in Monticello, they’ve agreed to do compliance checks, where they look at alcohol vendors that are selling to underage people. And we celebrate the ones that are doing a good job rather than demonizing the ones that aren’t, but it just makes it harder for a youth to engage in alcohol in a place where we can’t protect them or make the best decisions around that.

Jenny Sanchez:
Do you have any positive experiences or encouraging data you found you’d like to share?

Tom Bosket:
There’s a really good one right now, the young, one of our youth ambassadors designed stickers that are to raise awareness around some struggles she’s seen in our society. So she was like, is there a way to make that less in our community? And I was like, well, let’s look into it. And we looked into it and realized people do sticker shock campaigns or sticker information. And she designed this sticker, which basically says using alcohol to contain your issues is unhealthy and not the right solution. Stop putting a lid on your problems. And then it has alcohol as the jar of where you cap it. And then what you’re capping is your family, your stress, your health, whatever inside. And then she designed a second sticker that when you open the box, you discover it’s choosing healthy alternatives can be difficult, growing up is hard enough. And she did this little thing. Let me see if I can get it up here, “Recognize the positive decisions I make. I’m trying, have patience with me.” And they’re beautifully designed and she drew them all herself. She drew these by hand and this is one of the things that’s a drug-free communities, DFC, SALT grant is sponsoring her and helping her right now develop her skills. And my dream is we’d have 200 of these a year of all different things about skateboarding, about just things that people are excited about and offering it up in our community so that we had a knowledge bank that the youth were establishing for their fellow youth and getting them excited about.

Jenny Sanchez:
So if anyone wants to get involved, how can they reach out for more information?

Tom Bosket:
The easiest way is SALTCares.com. There’s contact information at the bottom of the page. There’s also social media on Instagram at SALTCares. People can find us and actually weigh in on any questions they have or comments. We welcome people, of course joining SALT and getting involved and SALT exists because of you, because of the people, everybody who sits at the table, that’s us reaching out to each other.

Jenny Sanchez:
Well, Tom, thank you so much for being here and for letting us know what you’re doing to help Sullivan County.

Tom Bosket:
Likewise. Thank you.