Ohio College Initiative to Reduce High Risk Drinking:

The Ohio College Initiative to Reduce High Risk Drinking is based in an environmental approach to prevention.

Environmental management is based in the public health model, which stems from the premise that to affect health-related behaviors, prevention efforts must address the host, agent, and environment. In preventing high risk drinking, the host is the student, the agent is alcohol, and the environment is the campus community.

The traditional approach to prevention on college campuses - attempting to influence individual students' drinking choices - has had limited success, because it only addresses one (the host) of those three entities. The agent and the environment are unaffected, creating a dynamic in which students are expected to make low risk drinking choices in an environment that supports and encourages high risk drinking.

Environmental management strategies address the agent and environment, providing a comprehensive approach to prevention.

The Ohio College Initiative to Reduce High Risk Drinking focuses on five strategies for environmental management:

• Offering alcohol-free social, extracurricular, and public service options
• Creating a health-promoting normative environment
• Restricting the marketing and promotion of alcoholic beverages both on and off campus
• Limiting alcohol availability
• Increasing enforcement of laws and policies

Those five strategies are delineated in this section, and examples of the strategies are listed, as well.

Individual colleges and universities should prioritize the strategies in accordance with the needs of their campus community, ideally identified through a needs assessment process. Those embarking on a campaign to utilize strategies for environmental management must also choose activities and initiatives within the strategies to best accomplish the goals of the campus community coalition.

Project directors and campus community coalitions should make well-educated, thoughtful decisions about which programs and activities to initiate within any given strategy. Dialoguing with peers at other colleges and universities about their experiences with some of the specific programs can also provide valuable insights to choosing programs and tips for implementation.