The Cara Society is a registered not for profit society registered under the British Columbia Society Act, with business operations headquartered in Vancouver, BC. The Cara Society will operate as a social services society, providing services related to substance abuse and addiction to teen-aged children.
The founders of the society believe that The Cara Society can and will make a difference in the lives of teen-aged children, by providing resources to the children and the parents of those children to help them to reduce the harm caused by substance abuse and addiction. These resources will be provided through a series of hard copy resource guides as well as digitally through the Internet.
The Cara Society is committed to reducing the harm resulting from substance abuse and addictions in the lives of teen-aged children.
We will endeavor to reduce the harm to children by helping to prevent substance abuse and addiction from entering their lives, and by helping to provide aid to those children who's lives are already affected.
The society will begin the prevention by producing a series of informative and user-friendly regional addiction and resource guides for parents and a targeted resource guide for children. The guides will be distributed through our schools and community.
The regional resource guides will give parents and others in the community listings of resources that are available in their local community to help them to understand and to deal with the problems associated with substance abuse and addiction.
We intend to have direct input from teen-agers in the development of the targeted resource guide for the children themselves. We want this book to compel teen-agers to get the book and read it. Many of the same resources from the regional guides will also be in children's guide; however, it will be structured in a different way.
Once the society has released the resource guides, we will begin to provide aid services through safe houses for those currently on the streets.
The primary Target is 1 st school age children between the ages of 11-15. Our secondary markets are the parents of the school age children. Our intention is to first reach this market by providing a complete addiction resource guide that will contain the following information:
• Recognition, signs of addiction
• Explanation of addiction
• Description of drugs – appendix
• List of resources
• Recovery - Stages of change
• Health, eating, exercise, spirituality
Resources
• Assessment Centers
• Treatment Centers
• Detox Centers
• Addiction services
• Interventions – Daryl Samson-NV
• Crisis – help lines
• Transition Centers
• Hospitals
• Support services
This guide will be distributed to the schools, community centers, and the major drugs stores. The first guide will be funded by selling advertising and obtaining a grant to help in its launch.
The guides will be regionalized based on the health regions of the province.
Our initial goal is to guide in the schools in the province. We also want the children of the province to create their own guide.
We feel that this guide will not only be self-sustaining, but will make a profit of approximately $20,000 to $30,000 per guide. Other than the resource guide there are a number of other areas to raise funds such as a local celebrity golf tournament
The members of the society will appoint a Board of Directors for the society. The Board of Directors will manage the daily operations of the society until such time that the board hires an executive director.
The long-term goal is to try and do this across the country province by province. The money raised would go toward creating or to help fund safe houses for the children between 11 and 15 who fall between the cracks; these children should be under the care of the children's ministry but for some reason end up on the streets.
We intend to have the first directory published within 6 months, and then to produce a directory every 3 months thereafter. All of the guides required for the entire province should complete in 18 months.
Significant progress has been made over the last 6 - 9 months, we have hired a sales person (to sell advertising) set up an office purchased most of the equipment necessary and we have approximately $10,000 in the bank, the web domains have been registered and reserved, and a web page has been designed and is ready to go.