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Sonoma County, a diverse county of over one million acres is famed for its agriculture industry and recreation boasting a booming economy and a unique lifestyle for its citizens described by the famed Luther Burbank as the chosen spot of all the earth. Sonoma County is the place

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to live, work and play as we move into the 21st century. Led by the forward looking philosophy of its governing bodies. Sonoma County's 340,000 residents are a harmonious, successful blend of ethnic and economic backgrounds. We invite you to take a closer look at Sonoma County in

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the nineties with your host Rich McGlinchey, how you doing everybody Welcome to this edition of Sonoma County in the nineties we're gonna be talking to two women who are members of the county alcoholic services division and we're talking about two different groups, friday night live and

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club live. I'm going to give you a little more information about both those in just a moment. But before we actually get into our question and answers for our program today, I want to call your attention to the artwork on the studio walls today. These these

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water colors, I should say are the work of Nina J. Bonus Nina used to be a planner with the county of Sonoma. She became a, an artist and a very excellent one. Now these two paintings, one represents mechanical beach near fort Bragg and the other one,

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the bona vista vineyards in Sonoma And we thank Nina very, very much for use of these beautiful paintings. I think they're great, don't you ladies. Great. Okay friday night Live and Club live, our prevention programs administered by the Sonoma County alcoholic services division and is supported

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by the Sonoma County Office of Education. Ellen draper, who is on in the center of your screen has been the friday night live coordinator for the last nine years and Kathleen Camera Woolford is in her second year as club live coordinator. And how are you? It's

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nice to have you here and this is really very interesting. Um, I know a little of this, so I'm gonna get just as much education out of this. I hope as our audience does today. Um, let's start with you Ellen, why don't you begin by? Okay,

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well in the past, prevention has normally been perceived as something that is done to an individual in order to keep them from engaging in harmful behavior. Whether it has to do with alcohol or drugs or walking in front of cars is I mean walking across the

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street as cars are coming or whatever, It's preventing people from doing something that could harm them. In the last few years. Prevention has expanded to include what we call an environmental approach as well. And that is to take a look at the environment that can also

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contribute towards running interference with behavior that could be harmful to sort of simplify it a little bit. It would be like uh, prevention in the past has been well, if we fix the kid, then everything will be alright. Whereas the environmental approach is that in order

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to fix the kid, there are other things we need to take a look at, like um what's, you know, what are all the areas of influence in a child's life, their school, their home, their community, and what is happening in those areas that contribute or encourage

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a child to choose behaviors that could be harmful to them. And let's take a look at those and address those as well as the child themselves. Well actually, maybe we should back up just a trifle two things I want to, I want to do. What is

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your background you've been here? It says for nine years, I think it is, it's just been your field all along. No, it hasn't. Actually. I started doing um I, my first job or my first career was as a restaurant manager and I managed around managed roundtable

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pizza parlors in snowmen, marin County. And in that period of time a lot of my customers, well, most of my customers and a great deal of my employees were teenagers and that's when I became aware of the amount of drinking and driving and just drinking that

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was occurring among the teenage population. But at that particular point, I thought, you know, somebody ought to do something about this without thinking of myself and after a few years and having a young daughter and being married and I decided to make a career change and

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those were contributing factors to that. And I went to college and got a degree in psychology and during that period of time I started to volunteer with school groups to develop sad chapter students against driving drunk and out of that the there was this pilot program

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going on in Sacramento called friday Night Live which the county of Sonoma applied to implement and I applied for the job and got it. So I've been doing it ever since Kathleen. How about a similar rundown on you? I was a teacher for six years of

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junior high school students and I decided at the end of the six years it was really time to make a change um for a variety of reasons. And five years ago I moved into the prevention field, I started working at the santa Clara County Office of

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Education as the county coordinator for the Comprehensive alcohol and drug prevention Education Grant which the office of just um O. C. J. P. The Office of Criminal Justice Planning in Sacramento was supporting and that then led me up to Sonoma County and I've worked in continuing

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my work in prevention, accepted the club live position and worked also in a pregnancy prevention grant. So I see the wide range as Ellen had said to the prevention field well it's important. I think we kind of laid the groundwork a little bit to the audience

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knows why we're talking about why does friday night Live club lives exist? Are we dealing with youngsters having problems? And we obviously are Kathleen, you were a teacher, one of the school's been doing to address prevention well, as part of a federal and state program, a

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lot of money became available to public schools and some to private schools within the last four and five years money to put towards alcohol and other drug prevention programs. And tobacco and the three grants were combined into a consolidated application with nine different areas in which

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schools needed to address in order to receive the money. The nine different areas span from planning to evaluation, but some of the most critical elements in between were issues dealing with policy, for example, were schools able to develop tobacco free campuses as a way of modeling

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that tobacco is not healthy. And we're going to make a change the social norm regarding tobacco to things, um, regarding involvement with law enforcement, getting law enforcement more positively tied into school campuses curriculum intervention and even parenting involvement areas. The schools have mostly focused on curriculum

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and on some intervention techniques. They have implemented specific prevention curriculums. The one people in Sonoma County are probably the most familiar with is, here's looking at you 2000, which is a prevention curriculum that spans most grades, but we see most schools using it at the elementary

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school level. It's still used some at the middle school level, but it begins to taper off by the time kids get into high school. A question here that obviously encompasses both of you how to friday night live and club live operate as prevention programs. Okay, well

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both programs operate. Um, we focus on working collaboratively collaboratively with youth with schools with the community, um, with parents in order to identify and prevent harmful impacts on youth and alcohol in terms of their use and involvement as well as other drugs. It's not just alcohol

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and we like to do it in a way that's proactive rather than reactive. In other words, what can we do before it becomes a serious problem rather than wait until it's a problem and then trying to scramble around and find a way to take care of

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it. It's one of our goals also to have this fit into a school's comprehensive prevention program by involving students and by involving maybe other people in the community who have not been involved before in changing and improving the school environment by having kids being involved in

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the design of alternative activities that are alcohol and drug free. You both located at where we both have our offices at Sonoma County alcohol services, also known as the Orinda Center, which is off of Bennett Valley Road in santa rosa. So that's where you're located. But

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we do a lot of traveling around the country. We do a lot of traveling around the county. I'll bet you do at school sites or community meetings or coalition meetings. Yeah. Um, why does Sonoma County have these programs? Well, initially Friday night live was developed to

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address teen drinking and driving in Sonoma County and like I said, Friday night live was a pilot program in Sacramento 10 years ago, which has since evolved to, to just about the rest of California. I think out of the 56 counties in California, I think now

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48 of them have Friday night live and 36 have club live program somewhere in that area. So 10 years ago, teen drinking and driving was a very serious problem. It, it was, it still is the number one killer of teenagers in the nation and in California.

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And so it was developed as a way to get kids actively involved in addressing that problem. And that's the crux of the friday night live program is having it be a student action oriented as possible, getting away from adults telling kids what they should and shouldn't

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be doing and how they should and shouldn't be doing it and getting them involved in identifying what the problems are and identifying ways in which they can be involved in solving whatever those problems are. So with the teen drinking and driving, we did a variety of

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things. We did full school assemblies with a multi image slide shows and teenagers getting up and talking with their peers usually and they were always teenagers that had a personal experience with drinking and driving. They had either been a victim in some way or were responsible

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for such an incident. Um, we would invite the students of the schools to become members of friday night live, which meant that they were willing to take a stand about not drinking and driving and finding safe alternative ways home. We also helped to develop other probe

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like the safe rides program which actively involved teenagers to provide safe rides home to their peers. We also got involved in developing project graduation in the county. There were a lot of different things that were done. You know, again, looking at the big picture and realizing

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that teen drinking and teen drinking and driving doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a lot of contributing factors to it. The other thing to consider too is part of our jobs is that we want to in addition to working with the youth work with the adults

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to make them more aware of the role that alcohol plays in this high death rate because alcohol is the leading factor that will put kids at risk for a variety of things. People most obviously associate drunk driving accidents, injuries and death. But alcohol is a significant

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factor in domestic violence, in drownings in sexual assaults. It's, it's so far reaching and it's always interesting to ask the kids to just look in the newspaper and look at the different police and sheriff's reports and see and and in the news reports and to see

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if alcohol has been involved in what's being reported. Alright, what early project I guess you call them. Did friday night live organized to address teen drinking and driving Well. As I stated earlier, we helped to establish and support the safe rides program. We did full school

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assemblies. We had student action groups on campus that would continue to address the subject on an ongoing basis on campus throughout the year. We helped with the project graduation, getting it up and running. We also um, established a team recognition event which we'll talk about a

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little bit later. One of the things that I would like to share is that when I first started doing this and I took a look at the sea statistics around teen drinking and driving in Sonoma County, what I saw is when you broke it down, we

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had on an average two students per school per month, 12 months out of the year in Sonoma County getting involved in an alcohol related crash that resulted in injury or death and after four years of students being actively involved that statistic went down 53% now there

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were a lot of other factors besides just friday night live, but I also in really clear friday night live and the students that were involved in it played a very contributing factor in decreasing that and it stayed relatively stable, although in the last couple in the

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last year and a half or so it is starting to slowly creep up and I'm starting to hear from kids again when I go on different school campuses that they're starting to see that, that their peers are not as vigilant about it anymore and they're they're

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getting concerned that it's getting to be a problem again. Well, there was the interesting contrast that we just learned about two and another survey in terms of students seem to be very aware of the role that alcohol plays and the dangers associated with alcohol and the

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problems, I should say, associated with alcohol, but parents of teenagers Don't have the same level of awareness, it's about an 80%, of teens identify alcohol as being a significant problem and less than 50% of parents of teenagers identified as a significant problem. That's a big gap

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that is huge perception gap that really needs to be addressed. And again, taking a look at the environmental factors that contribute towards risky behavior, choices that that young people will make or anybody makes. Again, you have to take a look at other factors that are there

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and in this particular case, when you have a large percentage of the adult population that don't perceive something, being as big of a problem as teens perceive it, then they're not going to be as actively involved in trying to address that problem. If they don't know

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about it, out of sight, out of mind as an aside, quick aside, before we pause for a moment. Do you feel your programs and these programs in general are the most successful of their type for young people? Well, no, it's not the only program I think

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what makes us powerful is that we work very much in collaboration with a lot of other groups and organizations because there is no one program that can solve the problem. We've all got to work together. All right. We're going to pause right here and the station

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is going to bring the public a very important announcement after which Kathleen Campbell, Woolford and Ellen draper. And I will return, We'll talk more about friday night Live and club live. First this message To keep a friend from drinking and driving. Just explain things to 6:45

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and parties at night and I still got shopping to do. But if you drive, you'll have to drop me off and pick me up and then I'll be late and you won't be ready. So I'm gonna drive and drop you off and then I'm gonna do

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all the things I need to do and I'll be back in time to help you set things up. Okay? Take the keys, call a cab, take a stand friends. Don't let friends drive drunk. What is a man? A man stands up for himself? A man looks

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you in the eye. A man shares his strength. A man protects his child. If you're a man with a woman who's pregnant, help her get the care she needs now because if you don't for help, just call Welcome back to this edition of Sonoma County in

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the nineties. A very important edition of our program because we're talking about youngsters were talking about programs at the Sonoma County alcohol services division is responsible for the people. We're talking with Kathleen Campbell Woolford on the left of the screen and Ellen Draper in the center

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here, we've been talking about the two specific programs, friday night Live and Club Live and these have been very successful and we're learning why whomever wants to jump in and answer these answer and the other person to contribute to it. When did the focus of Sonoma

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County friday night Live begin to broaden? Well I'll go ahead and start with that one. It began to become clear in the very beginning of the program that it isn't effective to address teen drinking and driving or teen alcohol use in isolation from everything else. I

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mean kids don't do drinking a vacuum. They have to get it somewhere. They have to have certain ideas that encourage them to drink. And when you, when you talk to kids, it's not uncommon for them to say that, you know? Well it's part of becoming an

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adult. I mean it's adult behavior and especially for teenagers, it's very important for them to feel like they are making that that step into adulthood. And so they naturally want to start imitating what they perceive as adult behavior and and in such they gravitate towards what

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are considered adult privileges, such as drinking, engaging in sexual activity, driving a car, things, you know, having a job, things of that nature. So when you, when you start, when we start taking a look at the teen drinking and driving as well as teen alcohol, we

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just realize that there's a whole lot of other things out there that we need to be looking at and addressing and some some way, shape or form rather than just saying don't drink and drive, you know, why, you know, where are they learning that, that is

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okay behavior. And so we started to take a look at, you know, where there's law enforcement and there's adult role modeling and you know, there's things in the media that portrayed as being okay and the same with their drinking behavior going out and partying is that

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their perception from looking at the media and adults in their life in their community is that there is most social activities or most social events have alcohol is a primary component to them. So from their perspective, how can you have a good time, how can you

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have a successful social event if alcohol is not a part of it? That's the way the adults do it. So naturally that's the way we should do it adults, but the grandparents, so we just pretty much we just want to get to the point where kids

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get the message that all social events don't always have alcohol is a part of them and that there can be some very successful and common social activities that occur out there that are for adults that don't include alcohol, so that kids get the message that yeah,

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being an adult also means being able to have a good time without alcohol being a part of it. And there are appropriate circumstances where alcohol is a part of it and to be able to tell the difference between the two. You mentioned some figures or one

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of you mentioned a while ago, two students from each of the schools each month are involved in some kind of alcohol related driving disaster if you will. Uh, that's a lot of kids involved in a given year or month for that matter. Okay, so why I'm

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saying that Ladies and gentlemen is, I hope you realize how very, very important not only the project is, but these two projects, uh, friday night Live and Club Live are for the youngsters in this community who haven't perhaps yet learned you don't have to drink and

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smoke to have a good time. These are not prerequisites. Um, what are the other factors involved here? Well, Alan had started speaking about really trying to change the community norms and having it be okay for kids to not have to party with alcohol and not have

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alcohol associated with some of their events. And we both feel really fortunate that we get to work with really wonderful people in the community who are also trying to do those things. There's a youth and alcohol committee that we should probably mention some of the things

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that they have been doing, they have worked very hard to have some ordinances put in place and there's one in santa rosa now, Petaluma, the unincorporated area of Sonoma County and currently two other and Rohnert Park just adopted. There's that's right and they are sometimes called

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loud party ordinances, but there are also ways to hold adults responsible who supply alcohol. So if people live in one of those communities, they need to know that they will be held financially liable for the police expenses that are incurred upon. Usually a second call to

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a party that is usually very loud and usually has alcohol that's being served to underage miners. Yes. Just experienced one of those in the neighborhood. Yes. Um, actually had a good example though of another double standard because, because some of the other factors is the adult

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drinking behavior, but there's also double standards and double messages that you know that kids get and teenagers especially are so sensitive to double messages and double, just double standards, it's like, it's okay for you, but it's not for me that really gets the hair on their

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back up and other things like alcohol advertising. There, there's a lot of alcohol advertising, you know, the beer and liquor industries are the worst offenders that specifically target underage drinkers, you know, because they need to create the next generation of consumers and then, you know, there's

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also just the community norms that are established, there really are no standard definitions that everyone is agree in agreement to as far as what constitutes low risk responsible drinking behavior for adults. So many, you can go into any social event and and ask people what is

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responsible drinking and probably everyone's gonna disagree, they're gonna have their own definition, but you know, an example of a double standard or a double messages, you know, example, ted danson pouring drinks for a project graduation fundraiser which from Mendocino County, which I find a double a

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double message, There are probably some other words I could use, but it's a double message because the whole point of project graduation is to provide an all night party for graduating seniors that gives them an experience of having the best time with all of their friends

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and have it be completely alcohol and drug free. And it is really important that adults show kids that we're not just asking you to do this, but we can demonstrate it for you to that we be role models to them and they were not very good

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role models to say, well we really want to provide this party for you, but we can't successfully do it without alcohol being a part of it. What you know, what message does that give kids. Okay, first of all I want you to give the phone number

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that people can reach you at right now probably right now would be a good time you can reach either. Eleanor I will share an office in the same phone at 5 to 8 to 068. And we're at the Orinda center in santa rosa. Ok. And that's

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5 to 8 to 068. We cannot were also listed under county listing for Sonoma County alcohol services. You know something we've got so much to ask on a couple of minutes left but I want to throw this anyway. One of the greatest hypocrisy I've seen on

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television. I'm not here to knock the advertising industry but one of the beer companies has something for light beer and they said no non alcoholic beer and said this is what they drink when they're not drinking beer. And that that's a classic double standard as far

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as the advertising. Alright, if you just a few moments left described the current projects for Okay, why don't we focus on the recognition event since we have such little time? Well, yeah, some of the projects are the mural project that we're working on collaboratively with the

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Sonoma County Cultural Arts Council, the Sheriff's department and currently the Acapulco restaurant where one of the murals is being painted. We also, I helped work with a group last year that um wanted to identify a way to address and involve youth in problems in santa rosa

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which resulted in the team council. And then um we're also doing youth leadership and then the annual teen recognition event and this is the poster for this year. This is our seventh year and we recognize 25 teenagers in Sonoma County for one of three categories. Service

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appears service to community or out standing role models and our selection committee is made up of kids who have been recognized in the past and we have a really nice dinner and give them a very nice award and just you know, and we really focused on

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the invisible kids and because it's not academic or athletically oriented, it's just kids that you know, maybe they don't have an A average, maybe they've got a c average or maybe they've dropped out of school but their kids that are out there making a difference and

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that's a wonderful idea. We've got about a minute left. I can't ask the other things for him. So we'll just have to have to come back. How about coming back maybe in the spring sometimes talking about things that you have planned for the next graduation period.

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Um Any final thoughts? Well, we encourage the community to also nominate teens and they can receive a nomination form by phoning the number that we had given earlier. All schools will receive copies of the nomination forms. All middle schools and high schools. Right, okay. All right.

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We're just about out of time. So I'm going to have to stop asking all these interesting questions. Thank you both for being here. Ladies and gentlemen, we've been talking to Kathleen Campbell Woolford and we've been talking to Ellen draper. They are responsible for friday night live

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in Club live. I'm Rich McGlinchey, the program, Sonoma County in the nineties. I'll be back with you next week with another member of the county government, family or related agency until then. Good night. Good luck and good help and don't drink and drive. No matter what

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your age dot dot dot. Mhm.