Community transformational resilience for adolescent alcohol prevention

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the work presented in this book about how South Tucson Prevention Coalition created community transformational resilience to prevent adolescent alcohol use. Community transformational resilience is the ability of a collective group to transform their community in a manner that increases protective factors and limits risk factors. Community was created through the building of a coalition based on personalismo (value of personal relationships and positive communication) that was comprised of youth, community members, university researchers, and outside agencies. Transformation was built through the process of participatory action research in order to ensure equal participation in dialogue to increase critical consciousness of societal factors for adolescent alcohol use that lead to community-led/youth-led research. Resilience was created because the coalition changed the community environment by increasing community norms of disapproval of adolescent alcohol use and by limiting access to alcohol. Understanding community levels of readiness for change was valuable to creating incremental, yet exponential changes over time to prevent adolescent alcohol use.