Focus on Community: creating a path of good life choices

Impact Spotlight

Focus on Community Children in a classroom

Feb. 15, 2022

Focus on Community, Inc., a United Way impact partner, unites the Racine County community in an effort to prevent substance abuse and inspire healthy life choices. Its goal is to invest the community in prevention efforts and keep the community committed to living healthy lives, free of substance abuse. 

What issue or problem is Focus on Community designed to help/figure out/make better?

Focus on Community is Racine's primary substance abuse prevention agency.

What does Focus on Community do (overarchingly and on a daily basis?)

Our mission is to unite our community in an effort to prevent substance abuse and inspire healthy life choices. Our focus is on prevention, which when compared to any issue is the best solution. When something never becomes a problem, we don’t need to fix it. We advocate for greater investments in prevention because it is the best way to help our youth live longer, healthier lives that are risk averse and more focused on resiliency and long term success. Our organization accomplishes our prevention goals by working with youth as young as 5 and as old as 18

We know that the days of “DARE” and “This is your brain on drugs” are over. Those tactics were not very successful because they relied on a one time shock value approach. We invest our time and energy into the young people we work with. We know that by helping them learn important life skills and developing many of their core assets they will be more likely to avoid risky behaviors like drugs and alcohol and find greater levels of success in the future.

What is Focus on Community's impact?

“Give a person a fish and they will eat for a day, teach a person to fish and they will never go hungry.” This philosophy is the essence of prevention. Our agency has been teaching youth in our community to “fish'' for over 40 years. We have seen young people grow into successful adults because they learned the value of planning for their future and avoiding the pitfalls life throws at you. While we cannot take all the credit, we do know that in many ways our programming, which teaches life skills like conflict resolution, communication skills, dealing with anxiety, and managing peer pressure have played a major role.

In the last 18 months we have visited over 109 classrooms and worked with over 3000 youth between the ages of 5 and 12.  Our programming focuses heavily on implementing the 40 Developmental Assets Model. This model identifies 20 internal and 20 external assets that each person needs to be successful. Based on the last asset survey conducted in 2017 we know that on average young people in our community only possess 18.9 of the recommended 40 assets. This is a significant deficit, but we have seen growth in this area as the same survey conducted in 2014 showed that our youth only possessed 17 of the recommended assets. By providing holistic prevention focused programming we have been able to move the needle. By focusing on life skill development and building resiliency we know the power of prevention is real.

Each year we begin our programming with a new set of youth. Many of them will have seen us in their classroom before and are excited to have us back. Our LifeSkills program builds upon previous lessons with a fun and interactive curriculum. The connection that our facilitators make with the students is often a turning point in their life. Many of the youth want to spend more time learning with the facilitators and join after school and summer programs like Opportunities Club and some of these youth even begin to work for us in high school as Teen Peer Mentors.

Mya’s story exemplifies the impact of our prevention programming perfectly. She is one of the youth who began participating in our programs as a 2nd grader at Mitchell Elementary, joined Opportunities Club at Humble Park, and eventually became a Teen Peer Mentor as a freshman in high school. Mya believes that the college application essays she wrote about her experiences at Focus are a large reason that she was accepted to Marquette. Throughout college, Mya continued to volunteer for Focus and upon graduation she did a service year for City Year and worked at an urban middle school in Boston. During her journey, she remained connected to Focus and felt that our organization had played an important part in her role as a leader. Upon returning to Racine, Mya also returned to Focus and facilitated many of the same programs that had an impact on her. Currently Mya works for MPS managing several community centers in Milwaukee, however she still checks in with Focus regularly and daily utilizes the leadership skills she learned while participating in our programs.

What does the future look like for Focus on Community? How do you envision Focus on Community changing or growing to remain impactful and relevant over the next 10 years?

We are entering a new era as an agency. In fall of 2019 we purchased a new building that would one day become our headquarters. Once the pandemic hit the progress of that project slowed considerably and the building needed some significant renovations. We are excited to say that we will finally be moving into and operating out of this new space within the next few months.

This location in Uptown Racine will not only serve as our new home, but will give us the opportunity to engage the community like never before. We already have significant plans to work within the Uptown area to uplift, enrich, and engage the neighbors, businesses and youth in meaningful ways including: community guided and inspired permanent art pieces on the walls of our courtyard, a community garden that will give priority to the local neighbors, first time employment opportunities for teens that focus on skill development and job readiness, and an accessible space that is both equitable in its availability and inclusive of the people it serves. These plans will be instrumental in connecting youth and adults in meaningful ways, engaging the local community to create spaces that are equitable and meaningful to them, providing space for the whole community to take pride, gather and make change.

As with all things we do we will seek to operate holistically by marrying our mission vision and values into any project we undertake as well as with every program we continue to provide. The next 10 years for our organization is going to be very exciting as we combine over 40 years of strong prevention based programming with new opportunity and vision.

Jason Meekma is the executive director of Focus on Community