In Minnesota and Hawaii, Community Funds Take Steps to Curb Meth Use

Minnesota and Hawaii face different challenges in dealing with methamphetamine abuse,

but two community foundations have found innovative ways to tackle the problem.

Over the past three years, the Initiative Foundation, in Little Falls, Minn., has fought the drug in central Minnesota, a largely rural region where more than 300 “meth labs” have been raided in the past few years — and children have been found at the crime scene in half those raids. And over roughly the same period, the Hawaii Community Foundation, in Honolulu, has worked to combat the influx of the drug, which accounted for 58 percent of drug-treatment admissions in 2005 and was responsible for 87 deaths that year in Honolulu alone.

Kathy Gaalswyk, president of the Initiative Foundation, remembers when she first became aware of the toll that methamphetamine was taking in her group’s 14-county region, which sits directly north of the Twin Cities area.

In late 2003 Linda Kaufmann, a program manager, was visiting a grantee, the Wright County Crisis Nursery, in Buffalo. Ms. Kaufmann was shocked when she asked the staff members to name the chief obstacle they faced. The child-care workers were “worried about the toxicity of the babies that were coming there,” says Ms. Gaalswyk, and they wore rubber gloves to handle infants who had been brought in from homes where meth was being produced.

“Baby bottles were being warmed on the same stoves on which meth was being cooked,” she says. “It was heartbreaking to find what the drug was doing to the children right here in our region.”

Ms. Gaalswyk kept hearing similar accounts over the next year, and the foundation’s board decided in February 2005 that fighting methamphetamine should be a major grant-making priority. The foundation moved quickly, and joined with the Hazelden Foundation, the addiction-treatment center in Center City, Minn., to develop resource materials that examine facts and misperceptions about the drug, treatment options, legal guidelines for employers worried about meth use among workers, and other concerns.

“We don’t pretend that we’re an expert on an issue,” says Ms. Gaalswyk, “but we can mobilize the folks that are, and that’s what brings about community change.”

That summer the foundation also won a $200,000 grant from the McKnight Foundation, in Minneapolis, for its anti-meth campaign, and later that year the Bush Foundation, in St. Paul, donated $300,000.

By September, the Initiative Foundation had published a special 52-page edition of its IQ magazine devoted to the local meth crisis that had an initial press run of 100,000 — a far broader circulation than the magazine’s usual 13,500 — and was included as an insert in five regional newspapers. The foundation raised another $150,000 via ad sales in the magazine and contributions that trickled in.

Countering Fears and Myths

The foundation’s campaign was unveiled at a November 2005 conference in St. Cloud that drew more than 1,000 adults, as well as 1,100 students gathered at auxiliary sites who received sky-blue rubber bracelets embossed with the slogan “Life or Meth” and listened to David Parnell, who speaks nationwide about his seven-year meth addiction and attempted suicide.

Ms. Gaalswyk says the magazine and conference served a crucial purpose: “There were a lot of fears, a lot of myths, a lot of misunderstandings, and people just appreciated having excellent information.”

The foundation now works with 11 coalitions in central Minnesota organized at the county or tribal level. Each coalition must meet certain requirements, including raising $15,000 from other sources, recruiting diverse leadership, identifying local resources, and crafting a plan for fighting methamphetamine that takes law enforcement, public education, and treatment into account.

“We meet with them a couple times before they get going to make sure they understand the commitment they’re making,” says Ms. Gaalswyk.

The foundation helps the coalitions identify priority activities, attends their meetings, and provides encouragement and materials. For example, the foundation has worked with experts to develop ordinances that counties can use to determine who has legal responsibility for rental properties that have been used as meth labs.

“Meth touches all aspects of the community, in the way it harms the families, the schools, the workplace, the environment,” says Ms. Gaalswyk. “I truly feel that it is the biggest threat to the health of rural communities of anything I’ve seen.”

Challenges in Hawaii

Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away, the Hawaii Community Foundation has awarded 138 grants totaling more than $10.7-million since 2003 to fight meth use.

“Meth rocketed to the front page of the paper about four or five years ago, and it really did reach epidemic proportions,” says Chris van Bergeijk, vice president for programs.

“We haven’t really had a problem with the homegrown meth labs like you see on the mainland,” she says, adding that most of the drug is imported from Asia, California, and Mexico.

But the state’s far-flung geography presents special challenges to the foundation, which has three program staff members who work solely with its Crystal Meth Initiative. For instance, because much of the drug comes in through small airports scattered throughout the islands, the foundation helped create an antismuggling unit and related committees. It provided support for seven new positions in Hawaii over two years, and the effort was deemed successful enough that the county government later incorporated those positions into its budget.

Also on the Big Island, the foundation has awarded $1-million over two years to the Marimed Foundation, in Kaneohe, to start a residential and day treatment program for adolescents so that young people don’t have to travel to Maui or Oahu to get help kicking their addictions.

Cautious Optimism

The money for the Crystal Meth Initiative comes from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing, which has given the foundation four grants totaling approximately $16-million to combat methamphetamine throughout the state.

Ms. van Bergeijk says that without the federal dollars, the foundation would still make meth-related grants but that the efforts would be more piecemeal.

“We would have approached the youth-prevention side through some fairly conventional grant making. The state purchases bed space for treatment providers, and law enforcement would be doing what they could do,” she says. “But what we’ve been able to do is to elevate a strategy — to get people talking and to keep them talking.”

To encourage discussions, the foundation has attended or sponsored “meth summits” on Hawaii and Kauai. At the first, held in 2002, some 350 Big Island residents came together for two days to discuss the havoc that meth was wreaking in their neighborhoods, as well as what schools, religious groups, and community leaders were doing to battle the drug.

Says Ms. van Bergeijk: “Each year, we’ve gone back and reported what we’re doing and what’s happened. It’s important for communities to see that progress is being made, because when we started there was almost a sense that this was hopeless, out of control.”

She says she’s now cautiously optimistic. “We’ve seen the key statistics going in the right direction,” says Ms. van Bergeijk. “The challenge is to keep the issue at the forefront of the public’s attention, because it will take a long-term effort to create the kind of environment where kids can make healthy choices about what they do and don’t put in their bodies.”