UA Campus Health is raising funds in hopes of continuing their ongoing alcohol prevention program after a grant runs out this summer.
Since 1995, Campus Health has received Department of Education grant funding to support social norming programs at the UA. Their current two-year, $280,000 grant finances "Changing the Environment and Culture of Fraternity and Sorority High Risk Drinking at the University of Arizona," a program that surveys greek students and provides them feedback on their drinking habits, said Lynn Reyes, alcohol and other drug prevention specialist at Campus Health Services.
The Dean of Students Office and the UofA Bookstore will co-sponsor the first fundraiser to keep the program alive.
Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Jack Dykinga will give a presentation and sign copies of his latest landscape photography book, "Jack Dykinga's Arizona," Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the La Encantada shopping center, to benefit the program.
The proceeds from the book-signing will be shared between the bookstore and the Campus Health program.
Reyes, who is co-coordinator on the grant, said Dykinga's "Arizona" is on sale at the bookstore, and she and others involved in the program thought the book would bring in a lot of support.
The alcohol prevention program is split into two halves - Reyes works with the fraternities and Carolyn Collins, Campus Health director of health promotion and preventative services, works with the sororities.
The sorority program distributes posters and other information to be read at chapter meetings.
Reyes said the fraternity program was adopted from the University of Washington.
Fourteen fraternities participate in the UA program, which is mandatory for new members and optional for all other members. Reyes said her goal is to survey 400 fraternity students over the life of the grant. As of the last estimate, about 100 have taken the survey.
She said the survey is targeted toward freshmen and sophomores in the greek system, as incoming students are most at risk for binge drinking.
"When students leave home for the first time, they're experimenting with behaviors and sometimes they're not sure how far they can go and what's safe," she said. "They don't have enough information."
Reyes defines high-risk drinker as a person who drinks in one sitting to the point of .08 blood-alcohol content or higher. She says most UA students are not high-risk drinkers, but are in the moderate range.
Reyes said the program involves an initial individual meeting between the fraternity member and Campus Health staff, where the student fills out a questionnaire. The answers are put into a feedback report, which is presented to the student at another meeting.
Reyes said the feedback report informs students of their alcohol consumption and where they fit in relation to other UA students. It also includes a formula to calculate an individual's blood alcohol content based on height, weight and how much alcohol is consumed over an amount of time.
Reyes said in 2001, the program won an Exemplary Substance Abuse Prevention Program award from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration - a government seal of approval for the program's success in reducing alcohol abuse.
However, D.J. Asad, president of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, said he thinks the program is a burden on greek students and a waste of grant money.
He said he has taken the survey twice and was not at all impacted.
"I thought it was really wordy, and not really thought-provoking," he said. "I feel like whoever made the survey didn't have their finger on the pulse of the greek community - it seemed out of touch."
Asad, a regional development senior, said some of the questions and statistics seemed "not too realistic" and he was not motivated to answer them.
Asad said he doesn't believe alcohol is a problem at the UA and wishes the time, energy and money dedicated to alcohol prevention programs would be spent on other campus safety issues.
"Personally I think alcohol prevention is a horrible waste of money for this grant," he said. "I mean, you're not going to change people's choices. There's such a lack of safety on campus - good friends of mine are getting raped. That's where the effort should be."
Reyes said she feels it is important to continue the program so new greek members can be reached every year.
"You can't just stop after two years," she said. "When you have preventative programming, you have to follow through and continue to make progress."
Though she could not provide any official figures from the program, Reyes said she has seen success in the numbers.