Prevention Open House in Dawson County

In October of 2019 Eastern Montana Community Mental Health Center got the opportunity to open an extension of their offices in Glendive, Montana. This allowed for myself, the Block Grant Prevention Specialist and Stacey O’Tremba, the Partnership for Success Prevention Specialist, to move to the new office. With Prevention moving to the new location, we came up with the idea to host a prevention open house during the holidays to show the local community the services we offer and to visit the expanded facilities. The open house would be an equal collaboration between the Block and PFS Grants as well as other staff at the new office. For the Block Grant we focused on the display of resources at Parentingmontana.org as well as different informational boards on drug and alcohol abuse. This allowed for visitors to view different topics and activities that prevention specialists worked on, all while they enjoyed homemade apple cider and Christmas cookies. Throughout the day as people came to the office we were able to have great conversations about our past efforts and the plans we had for the future. The PFS grant took the opportunity with the increased traffic from the open house to showcase a holiday giving tree for the Dawson County foster care program. With the amazing members of our community, we were able to give every child in foster care within Dawson County great Christmas presents. We even had people bringing in extra gifts and handmade scarves to add the children’s gifts! In the end, prevention hosted a great day filled with warm goodies and good conversation shared with the members of our community as well as raising knowledge of the services we bring to the county. The open house was one of the many amazing ways we as prevention specialists were able to bring our combined efforts and resources together to impact our community to the best of our abilities.

-Allison Agostino