PRIDE Bermuda staff have qualified as certified prevention specialists, becoming the first on the island to work in the field of substance abuse prevention.

Judith Burgess and Truell Landy attained the designation last year, having successfully met standards set by the International Certification Reciprocity Consortium (ICRC) and the Bermuda Addiction Certification Board (BACB).

CPS accreditation demands candidates spend a minimum of three years providing alcohol and drug abuse prevention services at least 51 per cent of their employment time and that they complete 150 hours of education, 75 of which must be prevention-specific. Having met those requirements, Ms Burgess and Ms Landy then successfully completed the ICRC written exam.

According to Ms Burgess, the only other person on the island to hold the designation works in drug intervention and treatment. Their achievement is a first for Bermuda and one she feels was necessary to meet PRIDE's mandate.

"We believe that we owe it to our founders and our stakeholders to have the highest standards that can be attained," said Ms Burgess, the charity's executive director.

"Last year we achieved accreditation status and in going through that process, we also realised that we need to have standards for our staff.

"As the (longest serving) staff member and the executive director, I felt that it was imperative that I receive my credentialing in this field and I was fortunate to have Truell working with me who believed the same thing. We worked with (BACB) and the (ICRC) in our goal to achieve certification by the end of last year."

With the assistance of the Duperreault Foundation and the Department of National Drug Control, the pair were able to attend a two-week programme for alcohol and drug studies at Rutgers University in the United States, which better prepared them for the September 2007 exams.

They were notified of their success last October.

"It gave us more credibility in running our programmes and working in the community," explained Ms Landy. She joined PRIDE in 2001 and, for the past three years, has served as youth programme co-ordinator.

"The programmes that we run here for PRIDE go from the primary level all the way to high school and also include parents. The programme educates the young people on the dangers of drugs and it also gives them character-building skills, leadership skills.

"With that information, they're able to reach their peers better through assemblies or presentations, and they also do what we call 'reach back' where they go and visit the primary schools if they're in high or middle, or they go down to the pre-school level as well and make presentations. It's about sharing the information, making sure that they're giving back and giving out to their peers, as well as younger children as well."

Ms Burgess joined PRIDE in 1986. She worked as a volunteer for eight years, before she was named executive director in 1996. This week, she was eager to highlight the less obvious benefits to the community, which are attached to certification.

"As certified prevention specialists, one of the obligations is that we have to work with other members of our community. We have to ensure that the prevention message is spread, not just within PRIDE, but throughout the community with as many organisations as possible that work in prevention, or those that are committed to prevention.

"Having the certification is great, but you have to be able to honour the certification process. It's not something you sit on. It's not like if you have a degree, where you have it forever whether you get additional education or not.

"We have to be re-certified every two years, so you're constantly looking at where you are and where you need to be. I like the fact it brings you back to the community, because prevention is all about involving your community in what you do and what is being done in prevention."

The most recent statistics show that the majority of students surveyed do not use drugs or alcohol. According to PRIDE, the potential for problem lies in the impact the minority could have on the community.

"The stats that the Department of National Drug Control have, it was 2004 I believe that they did a survey with the upper middle and high school students," Ms Landy began. "It showed that about 25 per cent were actually using. So you've got a much larger group that are not actually using."

Continued Ms Burgess: "(Our concern) is the impact that the group will have if they continue to use. That's where you get the crime, that's where you get all the health problems and things like that.

"So I like to focus on the fact that we have many more children that are not using, but those that are can impact us so adversely that we have to continue to ensure that we bring more toward the non-use and concentrate on protective factors, those factors that occur or are surrounding young persons to ensure that they have a healthy transition from adolescence through to teenage to adulthood."

Theirs is a new science, Ms Burgess said in explaining why certified prevention specialists are so rare.

"Prevention science itself is very new," the executive director stated. "If you look back to the 1970s, they used scare tactics. They showed you all the horror pictures ¿ the lungs that were infected from tobacco or the liver that had cirrhosis from the alcohol. That's really when prevention science started.

"So we've basically always had a treatment type of facility or modality, but prevention is very, very new. In 20 years it is continuously evolving. The science is so young that, for me, there is no way I could have left high school and gone away to college and studied drug prevention, because it wasn't there."

It's partly for that reason PRIDE is present at career fairs and similar events ¿ to make people aware of opportunities in the 'Third Sector', more commonly described as non-profit organisations.

PRIDE's success is also dependent on parental involvement and the valued assistance it receives from a host of volunteers, Ms Burgess added.

"One of our concentrations was to ensure that the membership ¿ our young people actually join as members ¿ that their parents are involved in some way in getting education with regards to substance abuse prevention.

"We're really excited because we have one advisor from Northlands Primary who just took 30 of her parents through what we call the Parent-to-Parent Programme. It doesn't necessarily talk about marijuana and what it does or alcohol and what it does, but it takes you through a process that you can work through to help ensure that your children travel through those adolescent, teenage years unscathed by drug use or abuse.

"We're excited that the advisers have taken that role on and we've looked at presenting many more parent programmes because we can never know too much about this area. I personally got involved in PRIDE through my children. PRIDE stands for Parent Resource Institute for Drug Education and we focus on parent peer groups."

Twenty years ago, there was a generally felt belief that drug use wasn't a problem in Bermuda.

It was only after a small group of parents went overseas and came face to face with conditions there, that it was decided to form a partnership "encouraging other parents to join with us, to look at what was happening in our community and decide for ourselves, what the things were that we did or did not want our children to participate (in)", Ms Burgess explained.

"I thought I was an informed parent but I realised that you can never have too much information, especially when dealing with teenagers, because there's something new that comes up everyday. Many times there are no boundaries and if there are no boundaries the kids are just going to go whichever way they want to go.

"We as parents have to realise that sometimes we cannot just be our children's friends we're also their guardians, their protectors, and we're here to ensure that they have a healthy lifestyle and that they're exposed to a healthy community.

"Tests have proven if young people can abstain from taking drugs or alcohol by the age of 19, the chances of them ever becoming abusers or becoming addicts, will be greatly reduced.

"Our laws say (kids can drink) alcohol at 18, but if we can help them to make those decisions to stay alcohol free until 19, their bodies just aren't mature enough to cope with drugs or alcohol prior to that age.

"The (middle and primary school) programmes are curriculum based. As part of the high school programme the young people actually come here and work from the PRIDE office because we don't actually have programmes in the high schools (but) we do know that when they get to high school they must have booster sessions in order to maintain their decision-making skills."