Webinar | Family Skills for Prevention of Substance Use, Mental Health and Violence and for Development, including under COVID-19

On November 11th 2020, ISSUP Lebanon presented their Webinar on Prevention through Family Skills.

Time: 4pm Beirut Time / 2pm London Time

Over the last decade, UNODC has been coordinating a global programme on Drug Use Prevention. This programme engages with policy makers to change their vision to a more evidence based one and aligned with the UNODC WHO International Standards. The programme also engages with service providers to pilot the transferability and effectiveness of different evidence-based interventions nationally. 

The main programmes being piloted nationally are family skills programmes given their large spectrum of benefit supporting healthy and safe development of youth, meeting the vision of the sustainable development goals. UNODC has been piloting such programmes in over 40 low and middle income countries and on families exposed to different vulnerable circumstances (from universal settings to refugee and conflict settings). UNODC has most recently developed 2 open sourced programmes family skills programmes (Family UNited- universal family skills programme and Strong Families – selective for families living in stressful and humanitarian settings). 

Such family skills programmes intersect with many large scale global interagency initiatives including the INSPIRE Initiative to end violence against children, the Helping Adolescent Thrive HAT strategy to promote and protect adolescent mental health and reduce self-harm and substance use,  the Youth Violence prevention initiative and more. Most recently due to the COVID19 pandemic UNODC (as well as other UN agencies) adapted tools to support parenting in such evolving stressful circumstances. 

This presentation would give an overview of the experience (as generated thus far on interagency platforms as well in low and middle-income countries) to advocate for further expansion of such initiatives to more and more families around the globe. 

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the value of evidence-based family skills for substance use prevention and other negative social outcomes (including violence and poor mental health) especially in the context of COVID19.
• Learn from experiences generated from Low- and Middle- Income countries applying such programmes for families living in different challenging circumstances.
• Overview of available free tools for dissemination to support families in such different context (including under COVID19).

Presenter: 

Wadih Maalouf, MPH Ph.D.

Programme Officer
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 
Division of Operation
Drug Prevention and Health Branch
Prevention Treatment and Rehabilitation Section