Say Nope to Dope

Our team hopes to create more awareness about the effects of drugs and alcohol on young people's mental health. We hope that young people will be able to find and chose an alternative to taking drugs and alcohol.

Our Social Issue

Our team has chosen to address the issue of the effects drugs and alcohol have on young people's mental health.

Why We Chose It

We felt passionate about it because it affects all of us at school. It is quite a huge issue at our age as we are exposed to it all the time. We want to see a big change and a less dependency on drugs. We want to make young people realise that their future is important and to fulfil their potential. We want to show young people the effects of drugs and why to say no to drugs and know what is right, as every young person's life is important.

Our Goal

Our idea was to raise awareness on drug abuse in young people’s lives. We hope to show young people that it is a choice, and we can choose to not participate. As well as that we want to demonstrate other alternatives to drugs. Our main goal is to educate young people on the effects of drugs and how they can be both long-term and short-term. We also want them to understand how important their future really is, we put posters around the senior areas in school with quotes to show this. For example, “Your Future Is Key So Say Drug Free”.

Our Innovative Action

We have taken many actions to spread awareness about the effects of drug abuse amongst young people. These include: - Designing posters and displaying them in the senior area of our school. - Designing and printing a leaflet for Senior Students. - We had two guest speakers who were recovering addicts. - We have a social media campaign on Instagram 'Say Nope to Dope'. - We conducted surveys in our school to find out how many students have access to drugs.

Our Impact

We have spread huge awareness throughout the school community (specifically our senior students) through many ways such as leaflets and posters throughout around our senior students and a talk we organised for them which was given by a local Counseller and a recovering addict. We have reached our wider school community through our Social Media Campaign – drugs would be a big problem in our locality, and we are glad to have reached parents/guardians/friends and neighbours of our school with facts, inspirations and information about the effects of drugs.