Opening the Door to Difficult Conversations

Guide and Manual, 2024

Opening the Door to Difficult Conversations Toolkit© is designed to assist adult allies in promoting youth health by facilitating groups for youth of any gender identity between the ages of 13-18. The Youth Engagement Toolkit’s primary focus is the upstream prevention of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and other alcohol-related harms. Opening the Door to Difficult Conversations Toolkit© is the combination of three toolkits previously created by the Prevention Institute: At-Risk to Resilient©, The Way Forward©, and Just for Us©. These toolkits were combined and adapted to support accessibility, adaptivity, and inclusiveness.

Opening the Door to Difficult Conversations Toolkit© provides activities, tools, and information to help adult allies facilitate youth groups. Toolkit activities are designed to provide young people with reliable, accurate, and credible information to encourage them to reflect on their health, make informed decisions about conditions that influence their health, and promote the importance of seeking help when needed. Each activity provides adult allies with ways to open conversations with youth and facilitate discussions about their experiences with alcohol while providing education about alcohol use (their own, their friends, and their communities), alcohol-related harms, harm-reduction, and possible coping strategies. Activities help youth make links between substance use and an increased risk of unintended pregnancy (and subsequently, FASD), sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections (STBBIs), unhealthy relationships, impaired driving, violence, and injuries.

• Introduction Opening the Door
• Module 1 – Trust and Community Standards
• Module 2 – Move into the Circle
• Module 3 – Consent
• Module 4 – Pressures Youth Face
• Module 5 – Finding My Strengths
• Module 6 – Sex and Gender
• Module 7 – Sexual Violence
• Module 8 – Alcohol Awareness
• Opening Doors Toolkit Appendices