College and drinking: province spending $400,000 to encourage dialogue
Funding will go to special projects like Selkirk College’s Dinner Baskets Conversations
The B.C. government is giving post-secondary institutions $400,000 for a project to address drinking on campus.
The Centre for Addictions Research at the University of Victoria is leading the project and will use the investment to facilitate dialogue between students about the effects of drinking, centre director Dan Reist says.
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"Too often, I think the issue is we don't think about our decisions around alcohol," he told On The Coast host Stephen Quinn.
"What we want to do is get people to raise their level of intentionality around these things — think about the choices they make, and make those choices a little more consciously."
Reist says he wants people to make decisions around drinking that don't lead to unintended consequences.
In a press release, the Ministry of Health noted that 39 per cent of post-secondary students who drank alcohol last year said they regretted something they did when drinking.
Reist says the funding from the provincial government will be used on a variety of special dialogue projects, including Selkirk College's Dinner Baskets Conversations. The program gives students a basket of food to cook and eat together, while they discuss their feelings on drug and alcohol use.
To hear the full story, click the audio labelled: Province to spend $400,000 on dialogue projects related to drinking on campus