Substoons

Spread awareness of the dangers with substances in young people.

Our Social Issue

Substance Abuse. U18s getting their hands on drugs, alcohol and tobacco products. The main concern is the average young person’s lack of awareness of the dangers.

Why We Chose It

We chose this topic because we as young Irish people have grown up in a culture where people our age drinking and taking drugs is seen as cool, normalised and or rebellious. We believe this subject isn’t cared for, and so we carry an obligation to stop those like us from falling into this trap.

Our Goal

Our idea is to spread awareness about the effects and dangers of substance abuse in young people. We want to increase access to information around the topic and about these dangers in a different and unique way.

Our Innovative Action

We raised awareness about the dangers of alcohol and substance abuse through art and visual aspects on Instagram. In an innovative way we blended both being informative and interesting as our art depicts the effects of underage drinking in a fantastical way. We have created characters and situations fit for television or animated film in a constructive format to spread our messages. We have written an article for our local newspaper about our project to spread awareness further in our community. We invited our local community Garda in to our school to speak to our students about it also.

Our Impact

We hope to have changed people’s views on alcohol and its effects on young people which will hopefully deter some of them from abusing substances while underage. We have spoken to younger students in our school as well as to fellow Transition Year students about this issue, and we are confident our words have affected someone’s way of thinking in a positive way, influencing them to stay away from alcohol and illegal substances.