KCAGoG (GRINS) receives GANS grant

Kings Community Action Group on Gambling’s proposal, “Building Community Readiness to Reduce Gambling Harm”, has been accepted for funding under the Special One Year Community Grant Funding from Gambling Awareness Nova Scotia.

This project has been developed to engage three towns and two villages in Kings County in a process that will increase their capacity to take ownership and implement actions to reduce gambling harms within their own communities.

It supports a public health response to gambling harm by shifting the focus for change from the individual to the local community and adheres unwaveringly to the Ottawa Charter of Health Promotion’s pillar of strengthening community actions.

While community actions to decrease tobacco harms and more recently, alcohol and opiates, have some history within our Annapolis Valley communities, reducing gambling harms through community actions is a recent development. With this project we expect that by assessing a community’s stage of readiness to take action to reduce gambling harm and matching this with stage‐appropriate strategies we can increase our communities’ capacity to take action. The Community Readiness for Change model (Plested, Edwards & Jumper‐Thurman, 2006) which evolved out of the clinical Stages of Change model (Prochaska, DiClemente, Carlo & Norcross : American Psychologist, Vol 47(9), Sep 1992,   1102‐1114.) gives us a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies. See Community Readiness Handbook.pdf.

On completion of this project we will compile the process and lessons learned into a workbook that other community groups can use to facilitate their community’s readiness to take action to reduce gambling harm.

Watch this space for updates!