#jocoangels

The first week of starting with our graduate studies we had scheduled our meeting with our preceptors JOCO angels. On our first meeting we had a virtual meeting with the team of JOCO angels and we discussed various topic about how they work, what their main goal was, and how their events are conducted, their partners and all the events they conducted. Then we were asked to present some ideas which we were interested to work with and also, they provided with ideas on what we could do for our practicum. Being their first time working with Campbell student they provided us the privilege to choose our own project and gave us the complete leadership of it and they wanted to use our own imagination and creativity to come up with project ideas and implementation of the project. Hence, for the first few weeks we worked on collecting data and coming up with our own projects for the semester. We individually came up with ideas on which we could work as a group. We were able to bring up ideas for events, we came up with advocacy for the parents and school goers, we also included coming up with support videos and testimonials with people who suffered from substance use and what journey they went through with recovery, including communication strategies and platforms to spread across about our awareness program. We researched articles and statistics on substance use and abuse, various prescription drug abuse data, data on medication-assisted treatment for opioid overdose, and availability of treatment and mental health treatment options available. We came up with ideas for newsletters. We came up with plans to implement in our meetings and schedules. We meet with the JOCO angels’ team every week to discuss our weekly progress. On the next virtual call we meet with the JOCO angels team with all the ideas to discuss and we got to finalized our project as the events for educating middle schoolers and high schoolers on substance use and abuse and the dangers involved with it. Meanwhile, we had the overdose awareness week coming up on August 29 and the team of JOCO angels had planned an event with music, food, testimony, worship, and candle lighting as part of the event for awareness. Even though I was not able to attend the event in person I was able to get to know the work they did in the event. That event brought us to light about the various issue associated with opioid abuse and addiction. They had music, food and also many had shared their testimonies and how they overcame their problems and how worship had helped them through the process of recovery. There were photos of people who had lost their life to substance use and behind each lives lost there was an untold story of their mental health struggles. They also mentioned about a lot of the issue faced by those victims with regards to mental health. Before joining this program, I have not had much experience about the prevalence of these public health issue. So, with this kind of exposure I was able to gain a lot of knowledge on the various public health crisis such as the opioid epidemic which was affecting not parts of the world and how rural areas were more affected by this issue than the urban areas. Proper access to medication services and healthcare facilities is still some of the problems faced by many rural places. While researching I came across certain articles which stated that young people are more affected by the opioid epidemic than older people and the rate of overdose deaths is also increasing every year. This is especially true in rural areas. Hence, working in a project which will help young people recognize the harmfulness of substance use is the main goal of our team.