Your Children Need You Parents Be Aware Substance Use and Misuse Event
Hilltop Community Centre was the venue for ‘Your Children Need You’ event. A community event focusing on drug awareness, prevention and families. Three guest speakers were invited to speak, an ex user, a professional and a mother’s point of view, a huge success and an excellent event.
The event ran off the back of Akacia Saturday School, (an African Caribbean School for children age 5 to 16). The first session started with the children age 8 to 16 years, Grantley Hayes guest speaker from Walsall West Midland spoke to the children about the basic drug awareness. The younger children ages 5 to 7 years were in the small room with one of our volunteers, using the multi media drug box, it was evident that the children knew a lot about drugs. This session was very well received by all the children and the feed back from parents are very encouraging as a result of this event, two young people have signed up as volunteers for our Volunteer Development Programme.
The second session started later than planned, with a group of about 50 parents, the speaker was Kaz Ghalmi, an addict’s story, and he spoke about being brought up as a Muslim, his relationship with his father and mother, his involvement with drugs as a young man and the long road back from addiction. The audience was hooked and at the end of his talk, parents have so many questions for Kaz that session had to come to a close to allow time for the second speaker.
Grantley Hayes, presentation focus on the African Caribbean culture and drugs. He spoke about the cultural use of cannabis and the drug of choice now, crack cocaine. Grantley then explained how the African Caribbean community are still not accessing the treatment services therefore missing valuable help for their addiction. He also gave an insight into what the treatment service offer and how easy it is to access them; at this point the group had grown to 150.
The final session was by author of ‘Mum can you lend me twenty quid’ Elizabeth Burton-Philips a mother’s story. At this stage the audience was over two hundred and growing. Elizabeth’s moving story about her family experience with twin’s boys with drug addiction and the tragic death of one of the twins, Nick. She also spoke of tough love, their worst fears, isolation as a family and hope even after tragic circumstances.
I have selected a few comments from the event evaluation form, ‘I thought it was excellent also found that having people who have been through this bad experience a good idea’. ‘It gave me a big wake up call’, ‘A very good idea, keep up the good work’, ‘Very powerful and moving story’, ‘The event was well organised which led to the full support of the community. Awareness of this kind is continuously useful for our community, keep the good work up’. ‘Would like to know more about the on-line café’.
As a result of this event 10 members of the African Caribbean community registered for the volunteer development programme and to date 30 families need assessment questionnaires returned.
