TAKE FIVE!

December 21, 2021

Jenny Sanchez:
Hi, I’m Jenny Sanchez. Welcome to Sullivan 180 Presents Take Five!. Our guest today is Thomas Bosket from Cornell Cooperative Extension Sullivan County. Welcome Tom, and thanks for joining me.

Thomas Bosket:
Thank you, Jenny. Thanks for having me.

Jenny Sanchez:
Can you please introduce yourself and give a brief introduction of your role and your organization?

Thomas Bosket:
Sure. My name is Thomas Bosket. I would say that I’m primarily a drawer. I spend my life drawing and for the sake of enhancing human behaviors, kind of strengthening our internal behaviors and foundations. And then for my organization, I am the program manager for SALT, which is Sullivan Allies Leading Together. And it’s a coalition, a community coalition of about 54 members that meet monthly and I oversee the drug free community grant. So I’m the coordinator of that, which means a lot of people make the grant happen, but I actually coordinate the people and the things that get involved.

Jenny Sanchez:
And can you tell us a bit more about the drug free communities grant and what you’re currently working on?

Thomas Bosket:
I’ll just read a little paragraph, just so I get the words down. “We are preventing youth substance use with the guidance of CADCA, which is the community anti-drug coalitions of America, of which there are over 5,000 in the United States. And we are one now in Sullivan county, which is kind of fun and SALT is following an evidence based model to affect the risk and protective factors identified by data collection in our community. We are one of 40 such similar coalitions in the Hudson River valley and upper Delaware river basin region.” And just to back up a little on that, the risk and protective factors or what, what protects a kid or an adult and makes life move in the direction you’d like it to move in generally. And the risk factors are things that can wear you down like stress or homelessness or a lack of food or safety, something like that. And so we work to enhance the ones that lift people up and any community member can engage in that. In fact, most people do all the time. It’s just that we wouldn’t have the problems we have in our county if there weren’t other factors at play. An example I can give is recently we were doing some work and somebody in a meeting talking about family values and just what that meant. And it’s come to mean like a traditional family, but to them it meant just love and kindness and bonding and community, and like a very broad sense of what a community and what a family means. And they were differentiating it from the commercial values that people instill, like making you feel like you lack something or that you aren’t enough, or that you need a better house or a better car, or it’s shameful to have a car that has dents and dings in it.

Thomas Bosket:
And so you should have a shiny new thing and you have pride when you have a fancy car and blah, blah, blah. And so they said, these are at odds with each other because there’s a multi-billion dollar industry that sells products that hide substances like in a child’s backpack or in their bed sheets or in their bed posts. And they were saying, this is against my family. Like, this is not a value that I like, why do they have to hide it? Like if somebody chooses to use, that’s very different than someone being conned into using, and then having to hide it from somebody that loves them, that cares about them. And so it was just interesting to me that that became evident. All of a sudden that a family value is very different than a commercial value. And so a lot of times there’s so much trying to get us to buy things and sell things that it’s not dealing with. The stuff like teaching a child to read or managing a neighbor’s stress or helping them navigate stress. And so SALT is primarily aimed towards that, towards, I guess making like practicing the things that make life a little easier or better, and like encouraging the practice.

Jenny Sanchez:
Why is it so important for our residents to learn about alcohol and marijuana prevention?

Thomas Bosket:
The easy answer is what a student said recently was because we have enormous problems with alcohol and marijuana, cuz if they weren’t problems in our community, causing people to have a more difficult life, we wouldn’t be working on resolving them they would be resolved. And we wouldn’t even have to talk about them, but like a kid said to me recently, we have a campaign coming up that a 16 year old designed that says, why aren’t we taking alcohol use more seriously? And then it says above and below, 3 million people died of COVID last year globally. And 3 million people died from alcohol related causes last year globally. And she said, why aren’t we taking it more seriously? Because her dad had struggled with alcohol. So she said, I just wish we talked more. Like I wished I knew more along those lines so that I could have talked to him. And my dad also suffered from alcoholism, and I never knew how to talk to him. And until she said that I, as a 50 something year old man, at that time when she said it, I said, I didn’t even know how to do this, you know, so we just wanna increase the conversation and get the perceptions kind of aligned with what’s true within research and understanding as a community. So instead of just presuming something, which a lot of people presume things about stuff, just cuz you hear it. But if we share information with each other and share our stories with each other of what has happened, we have a better chance of getting the right information so we can make the right decision. So they call it righteous information. It’s just information. That’s like, it’s, it’s strong, you know, and you can lean on it a little bit and feel like, yeah, I ended up here in my life because I wanted to be here, you know, and not because I ended up here and I’m like, how did I end up here? Like this is a whack in the head. So the more information we supply residents about alcohol and marijuana and other substances. But if we have the information, then we can make the best decisions.

Jenny Sanchez:
And how can people stay up to date with SALT and the work you’re doing with drug free communities?

Thomas Bosket:
We’ve made it really easy. Salt Cares. You go to saltcares.com or salt cares, on Instagram or salt cares on TikTok. And you’ll see information about what we’re up to most currently.

Jenny Sanchez:
And is there anything else you’d like to share?

Thomas Bosket:
You know it kind of relates to number four of how to stay up to date, but on the third Wednesday of the month at 9:00 AM, we all meet and you hear all the members talking about what they’re doing. And in the beginning I always felt stressed about it because I didn’t know what I was doing there or what my role was. But then over time it’s become kind of lovely to be bathed in what’s happening in the county. And that just gets me excited about stuff. And in my family, my family says, why do you do all this volunteer stuff? And I said, oh, I don’t know why you don’t, like, I just actually find it makes my life easier, I guess, because like on a Thursday night, if there’s something that’s going on, that’s fun. I can engage in it. And if it’s not fun to me, then I don’t engage in it. But at least I know it’s going on now. And so I can get involved a bit more and it feels good. The kids recently were drawing with me and some kids were like, can we start a drawing club? And I would love that in the county. I just never thought that I’d have a team of drawers that wanted to draw like that. And these kids are so talented, they’re probably 10th graders, I think. I taught at a university of art and design for 25 years. And they’re at the level of college students and they’re high schoolers and they don’t have a lot of people doing that around here. So they don’t know that they could go into that career or, you know, be designing games or graphic design works or whatever. So anyways, I guess that’s what I would share. okay.

Jenny Sanchez:
Again, thank you so much for joining us today, Tom. And for the work you’re doing to help the youth in Sullivan County.

Thomas Bosket:
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.