Staff Reports
Funding through a grant program to support community educational programming about drug prevention is allowing Bartholomew County teens to showcase their talents.
Foundation for Youth is among the agencies who have received funding from Project Prevent. Funds are administered through the Heritage Fund — The Community Foundation of Bartholomew County, with grants provided through the Mark and Wendy Elwood Substance Abuse Prevention Fund.
Six teenagers created a play, “We Know,” this summer that focused on what they know about opioid abuse and how to prevent it, FFY teen director Tim Green said.
Students worked with Mariel Padilla, who was part of a team at the Cincinnati Enquirer that won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for the newspaper’s work focusing on the opioid epidemic. Teenagers also met with Rory Willats, a theater and opera director, to develop the play.
The play, which was recently performed a second time Nov. 9 at the Greybox Theater at Central Middle School, focuses on a girl’s brain and how it reacts to opioids during the first act. The second act centers on interviews teens conducted with their friends and family members about the opioid crisis, Green said.
“They see it on the news, they hear their parents talking about it,” Green said. “Maybe they have the solution to it and that’s what they’re trying to accomplish with the play.”
Green said FFY is planning to put the performance on DVDs, which will be distributed to schools across the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. as a way to continue educating youths about the issue.
A third performance is planned Dec. 8 at FFY during the organization’s monthly teen night, which has attracted students from Northside and Central middle schools and high school students from Columbus North and Columbus East. The monthly gathering is targeted to students who are in the seventh to 12th grade, Green said.
FFY has also been awarded a $5,000 Project Prevent grant in which teenagers will create a mural possibly downtown or on the city’s east side focused on their feelings about the opioid crisis.
A separate $5,000 Project Prevent grant will be used to fund a podcast created by teenagers that will focus on the opioid crisis and what teens think about it. The podcasts, which will be created at FFY beginning in January, will be available on iTunes, Spotify and the FFY website when they are released.
Su Casa, which received a $3,000 Project Prevent grant, will screen videos made about addiction that were created by high school students Dec. 2 with the winning video being shown at 2 p.m. that day at St. Bartholomew Catholic Church.
