From 2005 to 2020, NASPA was awarded grant funding through the Colorado Office of Behavioral Health to address collegiate alcohol and other drug abuse prevention. The CADE supports collegiate prevention efforts by helping facilitate data collection surrounding alcohol and other drug use behaviors, creating online professional development opportunities for prevention teams, and providing technical assistance for all campus professionals as we work towards making our campuses a safer space for students to live, work, learn, and grow.

CADE works with 20 Colorado college campuses as the only statewide coalition focusing on substance misuse prevention efforts for college students. CADE is managed by the Health, Safety, and Well-being Initiatives of NASPA.

CADE‘s current funding supports 10 Colorado campuses in a cohort model to implement a statewide, multi-site social norming campaign on their campuses. In addition, CADE created an awareness campaign called “Time to Ungrind“, which aims to resist society’s culture of grinding and hustling all day, every day; challenges norms about college student stimulant misuse; and addresses mental health issues related to college life. By engaging in upstream prevention efforts and taking a universal prevention approach, we can work to increase use of protective factors and shift well-being culture across Colorado college campuses.

The goal of CADE is to continue building a coalition of institutions of higher education in the state of Colorado to address the issues of highest priority. These include: alcohol and other drug abuse and misuse, mental health, help seeking behaviors, and utilizing campus and community resources. To better understand these behaviors and to learn more about the current status of Colorado collegiate students, CADE created a statewide data set utilizing the National College Health Assessment (NCHA), which is administered by the American College Health Association (ACHA). To meet the needs of our campuses, CADE is continuously seeking and building partnerships with state and national organizations to provide evidence-based and evidence-informed resources to work more effectively and efficiently.

This resource hub will serve as a avenue for CADE advisors and students to have access to tools and resource to support their work.