Alcohol & Other Drugs Committee Minutes
February 1, 2013

Present: Craig Almeida, Meghan DeCarvalho, Ellie Stein, Michael Caruso, Todd Gernes, Jessica Greene, Trish Brown, Prithak Chowdhury, Chip Coletta, Andrew Jacob, Lina Macedo, Daniel Oakes, Beth Devonshire, and Tiffany Enos

Excused: Omar Rodriguez

  1. A motion was made to accept the minutes from the December 6, 2012 meeting; 14 Yes; 0 No.
  2. AlcoholEdu update:
  3. Craig discussed meetings that took place this week with two EverFi representatives. They presented data retrieved from AlcoholEdu as it related to Stonehill participants. They discussed the EverFi Coalition and the help it can provide in digesting the data we retrieve from the system. He put the website up for the committee to view and said that they can all be granted access if they’d like.
  4. One of the representatives from EverFi, KimberlyTimpf, will return to campus for several meetings. She will meet with the committee to assess their performance to-date and provide guidance as they move forward. She will also tailor a presentation for various divisions based on their focus. Kim will meet with the following groups:
  5. Alcohol & Other Drugs Committee
  6. Student Affairs Division
  7. Academic Affairs Division
  8. President and Division Heads
  9. Todd recommended getting the data out to faculty in the form of an executive summary. Craig said that would be developed as a result of the meeting with Kimberly, the President and Division Heads. It is the committee’s hope to get their support and buy-in for future plans.
  10. Meghan reviewed two lists she has compiled of students that expressed an interest at the start of the academic year in planning events or updating policies related to Alcohol use on campus.
  11. Responses clearly show a big interest in late night programming on campus
  12. The student information is available in a module of AlcoholEdu or lists can be obtained from Meghan.
  13. Todd questioned the need for a representative from Res Life for the committee. He felt it necessary for the committee to be involved as Res Life is developing their training for RA’s, etc. Meghan mentioned the possibility of looking for a volunteer from the lists of students she has.
  14. There was discussion about Admissions representation as well. Should our alcohol policies be addressed during campus tours.
  15. Prithak suggested a 1st year student should be on the committee. He knows a few possibilities and will forward names to Meghan.
  16. The Alcohol Prevention Compass
  17. The Compass maps the statistics that EverFi finds in their research. It shows a variety of ways to reach out to students and the effectiveness of each. Our goal would be to look for low cost, high impact methods such as group motivational enhancement. (See handout with graph full of colored dots for explanation.)
  18. The expectation is that this site will help the committee justify actions it would like to take moving forward.
  19. One item stressed during the meeting with the EverFi reps was that we must develop consistent messaging. Beth confirmed that parents prefer the transparency when we give them information about alcohol use on campus. They want to understand the issues when bringing their children here.
  20. Subgroup Updates
  21. New members to subgroups: Daniel Oakes volunteered for the Community Relations subgroup. Tiffany Enos volunteered for Messaging & Marketing.
  22. Prevention –
  23. A student has been hired to help with data collection and analysis.
  24. The group is contacting advisors and directors to educate them on the committee and its plans.
  25. Messaging –
  26. Discussing what types of message we want to get out to different groups on campus and various methods of doing so.
  27. Programming –
  28. Andrew and several students he recruited approached freshmen about attending events without alcohol as a way to meet other students with similar interests. They talked to approximately 300 students. The response they got was that the students had already made friends and would prefer this wait until next semester. Lina said all the events put on through Student Activities are alcohol free except for a couple. The general consensus was to wait until next fall to pursue this further.