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About 10 years after it was formed, the Pipestone Area Coalition (PAC) has ended.
The (PAC) was a community group formed after Southwest Health and Human Services (SWHHS) received a $945,000 grant from the Minnesota Department of Human Services: Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division in 2016 to help reduce underage alcohol use in Pipestone. PAC members helped organize the underage alcohol use prevention campaign, conducted student surveys, helped develop a county ordinance to address underage alcohol consumption on private property, organized educational programming, promoted positive community norms messaging and more.
When the first grant ended, another grant was received from the Drug Free Communities (DFC) program through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fund efforts to prevent underage alcohol and tobacco use. That grant provided $125,000 a year.
A letter sent from SWHHS to PAC members and other community partners earlier this month indicated that SWHHS would not be continuing the DFC grant or the PAC. Community Public Health Supervisor Jen Nelson said SWHHS had reapplied for the DFC grant and received an award letter in August that it was funded for the next cycle. She said SWHHS then received notice on Sept. 28 that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy decided to recompete the 2025 grants.
“Basically everybody would have to apply if you didn’t or reapply for fiscal year 2026, which doesn’t start until Oct. 1 of 2026, so we’d have a whole year without funding,” Nelson said.
She said it would be difficult to go a year without funding, so SWHHS made the difficult decision to end the PAC. At this time, she said, SWHHS does not plan to reapply for the DFC funds in the future. Instead, it will do substance use prevention work geared toward people of all ages in all six SWHHS member counties using a $429,070 Cannabis and Substance Use Grant from the Minnesota Department of Health. Nelson said the funding period for that grant is from Nov. 21, 2024 to June 30, 2028.
Tylor Veldhuizen, who became a public health educator/DFC coordinator last December will now be the public health educator and coordinator for the Cannabis and Substance Use Prevention program, filling a position previously held by Jenna Stephenson, who she also replaced in the DFC position. Nelson said Stephenson moved into a supervisor role.
Nelson said the Cannabis and Substance Use program started a year ago and funds from it have already been used for local programing such as the “High in plain site” program at the end of September. She said the funding can be used for community events and education efforts similar to those funded previous grants with the PAC. In the future, she said, it’s possible that there could be a larger six-county coalition similar to the PAC to support those efforts.
“It’s unfortunate,” Nelson said of the PAC ending. “But I think it’s great that we still have another grant that we can lean on and that covers all six of our counties. We’re still going to do some great work in public health and do some prevention in all of our counties, including Pipestone.”