On Thursday, March 28, local iJAG students took 1st place at the State Career Development Conference for their Saving Lives: One Spray at a Time Project. Three local iJAG students, Kaylee Greene, Liberty Muhly, and Austin Smith, have been partnering with the local substance use prevention coalition, Gateway ImpACT Coalition, since November 2023 to find ways to address opioid overdose and drug prevention in Clinton.
Iowa Jobs for America’s Graduates (iJAG) partners with Iowa schools to deliver career development programming that includes leadership training, career education, individualized guidance, and employer engagement. As part of this program iJAG students in 155 Iowa iJAG 11-12 grade programs were challenged to participate in the LOVE Project. The LOVE (Lifting Our Voices for Equity) is all about teams coming together to make their community better and fairer. Three iJAG students at Clinton High selected Opioid Overdose and Drug Prevention as their LOVE Project. They worked with community partners like the Gateway ImpACT Coalition to learn about these topics and then created a plan on how to address these issues. Students selected to, among other things, call their project: Saving Lives; One Spray at Time. As part of this initiative, they worked to get Naloxone into the hands of youth and those who may be in assistant in the event of an opioid overdose. The first training included information about drug prevention, overdose, how to use naloxone, and basic information about CPR and had about 20 people in attendance and over 5,000 impressions communitywide.
The youth are not done yet, they are looking to host their next event in early May with even more partners and are working to recruit even more youth to join their initiative. They have big plans for the community. The next stop for these students is to present their project at the National Career Development Conference in St. Louis, April 18-20, 2024.
To learn more about this project or get involved, please reach out to the Gateway ImpACT Coalition, 563-241-4371 or kristin@csaciowa.org.
Pictured, Kaylee Greene, Liberty Muhly, Austin Smith winning at State Career Development Conference iJAG 11-12 on March 28, 2024, Photo credit: Tiffany Harris
