Leveraging Recreational Marijuana Tax Revenue to Prevent Youth Substance Use in Boulder, Colorado

About the SEA Fund
In 2016, the City of Boulder launched the Substance Education and Awareness (SEA) Fund to prevent youth substance use by leveraging the city's recreational marijuana tax revenue to fund community agencies (partners) providing direct programming and to disseminate media campaigns. For more than three years these programs have reached youth, their parents, and adults who work with youth (such as teachers and YMCA staff) through collaborative programming designed to prevent youth substance use in the City of Boulder:

OMNI’s Work with SEA
Since its inception, OMNI has partnered with the City of Boulder and its partners to build evaluation structure and capacity over time. We worked closely with each SEA partner to enhance their organization’s evaluation capacity by creating detailed logic models and evaluation plans for their programs that connect their programming and data to the SEA Fund goals. This included a review and adjustment of program metrics that will give us new sets of data to review for the year four report.

To standardize data across all programs in the 2019-20 program year, we established common evaluation measures that all partners will implement. The common measures align with the SEA Fund goals and the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey, which serves as a benchmark for the SEA Fund data. These measures allow us to collect comprehensive data from each of the audiences engaged in SEA programming (youth, parents, and adults who work with youth) on measures related to alcohol, marijuana use, and vaping. Having these common measures will allow us to examine the impact of SEA partner programming on: 

• Parental/adult expectation setting with youth around substance use

• Parental/adult influence on youth substance use decision making

• Perceived risk of underage substance use

• Establishing trusted adults in youth lives

"I have really benefited from the easy access to support from OMNI, Boulder County Public Health and other like-minded entities. Being constantly connected, we are able to share items, events, ideas, suggestions, etc. to better serve our community."
-SEA Partner Staff Member

Evaluation Findings
Participation in the SEA Fund has created an environment for shared learning and partnership across programs, increasing partners’ substance use prevention knowledge and informing how their programs deliver substance use prevention programming. Over the course of this project, we facilitated cohort-style learning activities with SEA partners to build a cohesive evaluation structure. 

Through this model of collaborative learning, partner agencies have reported improvement in their program evaluation skills and capacity.    

National research on adolescent perceived risk of substance use has shown that increases in perceived risk are associated with decreases in substance use rates. That is why SEA programs and messaging are specifically designed to increase perceptions of the risk of substance use as well as build protective factors that buffer against youth substance use and enable healthy development. It was exciting to see that, overall, SEA program participants report high perceptions of risk and protective factors. 

The measures below represent a portion of SEA data collected in Year 3 on risk and protective factors.

In 2020, the City of Boulder is working with Boulder County Community Services, OMNI, and SEA Fund partners to incorporate an equity lens into program evaluations and technical assistance, to help all partners understand systemic inequities and help meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of the Boulder community.

We are proud to support the work that the SEA partners are doing in Boulder. The 2018-19 Annual Report can be found on our website  and the City of Boulder’s SEA Fund website.