Who We Are
Discovering the Reality of Our Community (pronounced D-Rock) is an alcohol and other drug prevention and awareness youth group out of the East Bay, primarily in Richmond and El Cerrito. We are determined to create community change around substance use, especially amongst youth. Using a community prevention lens, we look at the factors in one’s community that enable or encourage substance misuse: community norms, laws and policies, access, and media.
Our goal is to change the environment we live in without judging the personal choices of others. We hope to call out the current culture around substance use/misuse and the increased risks of physical and mental harms of using substances at a young age. First, we want to call out the alcohol industry that affects our community’s health and subsequently profit off of the problematic alcohol landscape due to preemptive state control over the regulation of alcohol sales.
DROC is a program of Bay Area Community Resources (BACR). BACR’s mission is to promote the healthy development of individuals and families, encourage service and volunteerism, and help build community. BACR provides direct school – and community-based services like DROC that aim to promote the healthy development of individuals and families and encourage community building through advocacy, volunteerism, and service.
Our Toolkit
For the past year, DROC youth have created a toolkit to guide others living in similar communities like ours with an oversaturation of alcohol outlets. We want to bring awareness to how harmful state preemptive law is and how it negatively affects our communities’ health, specifically regarding its limitations at the local level to regulate alcohol sales.
This website toolkit details the knowledge we had to gain to do the work we need to do towards amending current state preemptive law. Included is how we drafted and passed a resolution acknowledging the issues with how preemptive state laws are limiting current California alcohol laws at the local level. We hope that this toolkit can provide a foundation for you to begin the process of passing a similar resolution acknowledging these challenges.