Vision: To create communities where children prosper and grow into healthy adults. Our primary goals are to empower youth and build community collaboration to create a stronger and safer community for our youth!

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Mission: To prevent underage drinking, substance abuse, and associated problems through community collaboration, education, support, intervention, healthy alternatives, and building assets among students, families, and the community.

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Who's Involved: Team EPIC serves all four school districts in Roseau County (Badger, Greenbush, Roseau, and Warroad). We invite community members to join our efforts to keep kids healthy and safe as a youth prevention coalition! There's a place for you to be EPIC in the life of a child!

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Team EPIC is a community coalition made up of people from many different backgrounds who care about the wellness of youth and families in Roseau County. Our focus is on improving mental health, preventing and reducing substance misuse, and helping youth and families have access to support they need. We are always looking for people who can bring new ideas and perspectives to our group.

 

One of our top goals is to make it ok to talk about mental health and substance misuse, so people can feel more comfortable seeking help and opening up about their struggles. We also want to encourage conversations and clear up misperceptions. For example, through surveys of youth in Roseau County, we have found that most youth surveyed say they would rather not use substances such as alcohol, marijuana and tobacco. However, they also say that they think most of their peers DO want to use these substances. By clearing up this misperception, youth and adults feel more comfortable talking about staying drug-free. 

 

We encourage parents to talk early and often to their children about these and other hard things to get the lines of communication open. Because research shows that the more positive adult relationships a young person has, the more likely they are to make healthy choices and avoid risky behaviors, we encourage adults in the community to create positive relationships with young people. We have a lot of resources and even workshops to help adults see how they can be intentional in the relationships they have with young people, so that they are truly a positive support.

 

We focus most of our efforts on young people, because of two concerning things we know from research done about young people and substance use. The first is that the younger a person is when they begin to use substances such as alcohol, marijuana or nicotine, the more likely they are to face life-long problems with addiction and mental health. On top of that, when someone uses alcohol, marijuana or tobacco, they are much more likely to start to also use the other two. Because of this information, we focus equally on preventing youth use of all three of these substances. 

 

We are concerned about how youth and families may be affected by the new legislation legalizing the commercial sale of cannabis in Minnesota, and are looking for ways to create protections from any negative effects that may come. 

 

We have found that one of the best ways to figure out how to support young people is to ask them. We have over 60 youth who are part of Team EPIC coalitions in their schools. These youth work with their schools and their Advisors to plan and implement messaging and activities to encourage healthy choices, improve mental health, and prevent and reduce substance use among youth. These efforts have been very successful, and we continue to look for more adults who can help serve as Advisors and mentors to the youth coalitions in the schools.

 

We are currently funded by a Federal Drug Free Communities (DFC) Program grant.