Cortland Area Communities That Care Information

Cortland Area Communities That Care engages the community to promote a healthy culture for positive youth development. Our vision is for a community where all youth have the opportunity to be healthy and successful. Everything that we do is focused on prevention. However, prevention is about more than just drugs and alcohol. There earlier we can prevent the issues that might put youth at risk in our community the healthier and successful they will be in the future. We believe prevention creates healthy outcomes of our youth. CACTC uses data to select out areas of focus and determine the appropriate prevention strategies to address these issues. For example, we have surveyed youth in our community since 2002 to assess substance use rates and risk and protective factors. Each year, we survey over 1,000 junior and high school students throughout Cortland County. CACTC is a collective impact initiative. What does that mean? If we're going to solve large scale problems impacting our youth like substance abuse and literacy, and create a system where every child born in Cortland County goes up to be healthy and successful we need to coordinate and align our efforts.