IMPACT hosting info session

IMPACT Norwood will be hosting a ‘Winter Gathering’ on Tuesday, Jan. 27 from 6:30-7:30 p.m. at the Willett Room in the Norwood Civic Center.

IMPACT Director Conor Brosnan said the meeting will consist of updates, discussions, cookies and two new awards the group is looking to make an annual celebration.

“It’s going to be the presentation of the first annual – hopefully first annual – IMPACT Norwood Community Wellness Awards,” he said. “The awards will go to one adult and one youth who really embody the work that IMPACT is doing in Norwood. These aren’t people necessarily involved with IMPACT Norwood, but people just involved in the community and doing that good work amongst youth, promoting inclusivity, and really trying to help get kids to be in a safe space to grow, make mistakes and just be kids in a safe community.”

Brosnan said they had a lot of nominees – more than he thought they would get – and the winners will be announced before the meeting.

IMPACT Norwood is a grant-funded imitative aimed at curbing youth substance abuse and promoting health and wellness in the general community. Brosnan said the Winter Meeting is really just an excuse to get together and spread the word.

“It’s open to everyone, whether people have been working with IMPACT in the past or they’re just interested in learning more of what we do,” he said. “We’re going to start with a brief introduction of what IMPACT Norwood does and highlight some of the big initiatives we’ve begun over the last year.”

Brosnan said they will also have several of the group’s youth ambassadors – those are students in the Norwood Public School (NPS) District who work with IMPACT to help reduce youth substance abuse – come and talk about what they do for the group. He said then they will end with cookies.

“Because people like cookies you know?” Brosnan said with a laugh.

Brosnan said they will also be discussing the recent Positive Youth Norms campaign. The campaign is designed to highlight the statistics Norwood is currently seeing, in that youth substance use is generally down across the board. He said since the last Metrowest Adolescent Health Survey in 2023 (the next one is due for 2026), substance use in Norwood has been shown to be going down.

For instance, he said 4.8 percent of middle school survey respondents said they have at least tried smoking cigarettes, 8.3 percent have tried vaping, and 11.7 have tried alcohol. And for high schoolers, the numbers were a bit higher but still relatively low: 9.9 percent for trying cigarettes, 19.1 for vaping and 30.5 percent for having had alcohol once. That last one’s down from 50 percent in 2018, and in the middle school, regular vapers have decreased from 12.8 percent in 2018 to 5.2 in 2023.

Advertisement

“The numbers over the three surveys we’ve done in the last 10 or so years, they’ve gone down pretty consistently across the board,” he said. “Middle school, high school, no matter what the substance – marijuana, vaping, alcohol, prescription drug use – and it’s a good trend that we hope continues on and we want to promote it.”

He said the campaign will be postering thoses and similar stats throughout the Town and NPS to help show students that the norm isn’t what you might expect. While peer pressure can make it feel like everyone’s doing something – and herd instincts can really make the ‘fear of missing out’ feel really strong here – https://tinyurl.com/4k65hw3n – Brosnan said the aim here is to show kids that most people are rational and want to make good choices for themselves.

“So instead of focusing on that 19.1 percent of NHS students who have tried it, we’re going to focus on the 81 percent who have chosen not to vape in their lifetime,” he said. “So we create a series of posters – I think we have 12 of them and some are middle-school specific and some are high-school specific – and we created a variety to have them printed up and over the winter break we put 50 at the middle school and 50 at the high school. And you can also find them at the Civic Center, the Town Hall, the library and I think even the Light Department has one. There are businesses and organizations who have them as well, like One Local Bank, Title Boxing has a few, the Lark Center puts them up, A-Dot Healthcare, Wildwood Education, Oasis Behavioral Health, the First Congregational Church, just a wide variety.”

For more information on IMPACT Norwood and the Winter Gathering, go to ImpactNorwood.org