The King David Foundation has worked extensively with the under-served and under-represented Latino and other communities in South Florida (Dade & Broward counties). Our mission is to coordinate the activities of CLAPA and thus effectively provide prevention services and programs to the community. In order to do this, we had to address the lack of detailed information about the Latino community's prevention needs by engaging in grass-roots work with the Latino community, including organizing health fairs that included other community health and prevention providers and implementing SAMHSA's Strengthening Families intervention at community churches and centers.
For this reason, we realized that not only would detailed information about the Latino community's prevention needs have to continually be gathered, but also, a capacity-building effort would have to be undertaken within the community in order to arm the Latino community with the adequate tools and resources needed to successfully collaborate, provide prevention services, and achieve outcomes on October 23, 2002, the King David Foundation established CLAPA (the Latin American Coalition for the Prevention of Addictions). CLAPA's objectives were formulated towards reducing addictions in our Latin-American communities CLAPA is currently the only Latin-American substance abuse prevention coalition in South Florida.
As a result of the grass-roots work stated above, the Kind David Foundation brought together and establish a network of grass-roots agencies and organizations in out community. The process by which we have achieved our success and growth to date is one described and developed by the National Council of La Raza (May 1989), which states that one should implement the following steps:
By adopting this process and through our grass-roots work in the Latin community, Kind David Foundation and CLAPA's reputation as an agency and coalition that really know the pulse of the Latin community has grown in South Florida. In order to sustain this rate of growth and success, we have embarked on educating coalition members on how to be the best coalition we can possibly be. With this in mind, we enlisted two of the very best agencies at developing and training coalitions: The Florida National Guard and the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA).
The purpose of undertaking all of this training was to ensure that we provided ourselves with the best possible tools for sustainability of interventions, and that we came away with a clear mission statement and strategic plan to build greater prevention capacity; the ability to build a broad diverse coalition membership which is reflective of our community; strong continuing leadership; the ability to evaluate our impact and the current state of prevention activities in Latino communities; and the importance of having diversified funding sources.
Regarding diversified funding sources; through experience and training we have learned that coalitions with strong ties to the community are often able to continue their work even after a major funding source disappears due to the fact that these ties often translate into other funding streams. Currently, our major source of funding is not federal, therefore, in order to survive and thrive these years we've had to develop other sources of support, including accessing foundations, individual donors and business. For example, we have been able to attain both financial and in kind support by appealing to Latino-American businesses in the Opa Locka area such as
