Rutgers School of Social Work Faculty Receive Grant to Support Substance Misuse Prevention Workforce
Dr. Kristen Gilmore Powell (PI/PD), along with Drs. N. Andrew Peterson (Co-PI/Co-PD), and Cory Morton (Co-I), were awarded $739,529 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) through a five-year grant (total award amount $3,697,645) for their project, Continuing Prevention Workforce Development through the Northeast and Caribbean Prevention Technology Transfer Center. With this new funding, leaders of the Rutgers School of Social Work's Center for Prevention Science will continue operation of the Northeast and Caribbean Prevention Technology Transfer Center (NeC PTTC) for U.S. HHS Region 2, which includes New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and multiple federally recognized Tribal Nations. Its mission is to strengthen capacity of the substance misuse prevention workforce through the delivery of multifaceted training and technical assistance (T/TA) designed to increase knowledge and skills grounded in prevention science, health equity, evidence-informed and promising programs and practices, and cultural and linguistic responsiveness.
The NeC PTTC will provide T/TA to a diverse workforce, distributed across geographic areas with unique and overlapping prevention needs. It will develop trainings to transmit dense, didactic content to a higher number of participants; self-paced, online courses; individualized and intensive TA; community-grounded collaborative efforts; and face-to-face participatory events covering key prevention science topics.
The NeC PTTC proposed two additional efforts to advance the prevention field in R2. First, it will provide tailored T/TA in its specialized prevention subject area which focuses on data-driven models to guide community-level prevention efforts aimed at changing conditions to support healthy living and health equity. Second, it will implement the Building Our Leadership and Diversity (BOLD) Prevention Fellowship Program by supporting a full-time Fellow, placed in a prevention organization in R2 annually. The BOLD program, coordinated nationally with multiple regional PTTC’s and the National Coordinating Office, will focus on prevention efforts within historically oppressed and under-resourced communities.
The NeC PTTC will serve 2,100 unduplicated individuals each year and 10,500 over the lifetime of the five-year grant.
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