Friendly PEERsuasion at Girls Inc.
A Peer-Led, School-Based Prevention Model for Eighth-Grade Girls
Girls Inc. of Central Alabama uses opioid settlement funding to deliver Friendly PEERsuasion, an evidence-based substance misuse prevention curriculum, to eighth-grade girls in Jefferson County schools and housing communities, training them as peer leaders who carry prevention messages back to younger students through workshops, podcasts, and creative campaigns built inside their own schools.
The Challenge They Were Addressing
In Birmingham and the surrounding Jefferson County school districts, prevention had been the easiest piece of the substance use response to overlook. Treatment programs, recovery support, and law enforcement responses dominated the local conversation. Schools, meanwhile, were fielding a steady drumbeat of requests for substance misuse education, particularly around vaping, and most available materials were classroom talks delivered in a single sitting by a teacher or a counselor. Counties surrounding Birmingham carried some of the state’s highest opioid overdose rates, and in at least one partner school district, staff identified a parent with an active substance use issue.
Girls Inc. of Central Alabama, a Birmingham-based affiliate of the national Girls Inc. organization, already operated across health and wellness, healthy relationships, mental health, leadership, and life skills programming for girls ages five through eighteen, with continued tracking of alums through college and career. The Community Impact department, led by Lige' Richardson Shears, recognized that needs assessments submitted by school counselors year after year ranked substance misuse prevention near the top of what schools were requesting, alongside mental health and healthy relationships. The infrastructure to deliver prevention well, evidence-based curricula, trained facilitators, deep school relationships, and a girl-centered approach was already in place.
What was missing was a dedicated funding stream that could pay for the staff time, travel, training, and program supplies needed to take an evidence-based prevention curriculum into schools at the intensity it was designed for, two days a week, forty-five to sixty minutes per session, across a fifteen-session arc with eighth-grade girls. Alabama’s opioid settlement funding, distributed by the Department of Mental Health to grantees aligned with established prevention strategies, enabled that intensity.
What They Built
At the center of the program is Friendly PEERsuasion, a Girls Inc. national curriculum that has been in use and updated for several decades. The curriculum runs as a club inside partner schools, with parental consent and an interest meeting at the start. Girls Inc. facilitators meet with eighth-grade girls, ideally two days a week for forty-five to sixty minutes, across a fifteen-session arc that covers self-esteem, healthy peer relationships, the science of substance use, conversations with peers who may be struggling, mental health resources, and education on prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and other substances. Schedules flex to what each school can host: in some buildings, the program runs once a week instead of twice, and the curriculum scales accordingly.
The program is built on a simple insight: middle school girls tend to listen to their peers. Eighth-grade participants are trained as peer leaders who design their own outreach to sixth- and seventh-grade students in their schools. Past cohorts have produced podcasts, run staff-versus-student games that integrate prevention messages, and led open workshops with younger students. The peer leaders set the tone, and the message reaches boys and girls in the same buildings.
Two staff members in the Community Impact department allocate a portion of their time to this grant, with Lige' Richardson Shears providing department oversight. The team works inside Birmingham public schools, the Fairfield City School System, and three partner housing communities where Girls Inc. runs after-school clubs. Schools are recruited through long-standing relationships with school counselors and administrators, often surfaced through the affiliate’s annual needs assessment of partner counselors at the start of each school year.
Friendly PEERsuasion sits inside a four-strategy approach drawn from the Alabama Department of Mental Health’s prevention framework. Information dissemination puts substance misuse prevention messages into community spaces. Community-based processes convene district leaders, principals, and community agencies to make space for the program in additional schools. Education delivers the fifteen-session curriculum to eighth-grade girls. Alternatives takes those girls out of the classroom to events such as the state Prevention Day at the Capitol, focus rallies, and the affiliate’s Bold Future Breakfast, where two participants recently spoke to more than 500 attendees about their experience.
Key Program Components
Who You Need at the Table
What made a willing partner essential vs. optional?
The distinguishing feature of a required partner is durable relational trust with the schools and families who decide whether the program runs at all. School counselors and administrators do not hand over their building, their schedule, and their students to a vendor with a flyer. They open the door because Girls Inc. has been in the community for decades, because their colleagues at other schools have hosted Friendly PEERsuasion before, and because the staff who walk in already know how to meet middle-school students where they are. Partners who lacked that track record or could not deliver an evidence-based curriculum facilitated by trained staff would not be able to run this program.
Helpful partners expand reach without being essential to day-one operations. The City of Birmingham, the Children's Policy Council, the Addiction Prevention Coalition, and other youth-serving agencies amplify the affiliate's presence in the community and surface needs the team would not otherwise see. They are part of what makes the program visible. They are not the reason a girl walks into the room and stays.
Budget Breakdown
What is the minimum viable budget to replicate this?
At roughly $75,000 per year, this is already a minimum viable replication of an evidence-based prevention model in schools. The award covers two part-time facilitators, materials, and travel for the fifteen-session curriculum, attendance at one statewide prevention conference, and basic evaluation. A replicating community could run a single cohort with one staff facilitator at roughly $40–60k per year if housed within a youth-serving organization that already has school relationships, an evidence-based curriculum license, and program management capacity. What is not optional at any budget level is the dedicated staff time to be physically inside schools on a consistent, twice-weekly schedule and the relationships with school counselors that make those sessions possible.
What Worked and Why
Specific decisions or design features that drove success
Putting the curriculum in the hands of eighth-grade peer leaders is the design choice that gives the message reach the program could not buy. Eighth-graders teach the lessons to sixth- and seventh-grade girls, and those younger girls take the language home, into the lunchroom, and into mixed-gender spaces where the program itself never goes. A girls-only curriculum ends up shaping how boys in the same school hear about substance use prevention, because the messenger is a peer they already trust.
Running the program as a club, with parent consent and an interest meeting at the start of each cohort, separates it from a one-off classroom talk. Girls opt in. Parents are informed. The cohort meets on a consistent schedule for the full fifteen sessions, allowing the curriculum to build sequentially as it was designed to. A single assembly or a one-period visit cannot deliver the behavior change the model is built around, and starting from the club frame is what makes the difference clear to schools and parents.
Scaling the schedule to whatever a host school can host is the second design choice that has kept the program inside school walls. When a school can only offer one session a week, or only thirty minutes, the team adapts the pacing rather than walking away. That flexibility can mean the difference between a school saying yes and a school saying not this year.
Building on long-standing relationships with school counselors and administrators is what gets the first yes. Girls Inc. has been in Birmingham since 1938, and many of the counselors greenlighting the curriculum today were Girls Inc. participants themselves. The grant did not have to fund the relational foundation. It funded the dedicated staff time to use it.
Public-stage opportunities give participants a leadership identity that lasts beyond the cohort. Two girls from the program spoke at the state Prevention Day at the Capitol, two more presented to an audience of more than five hundred at the annual Bold Future Breakfast. Several have attended the Alabama School of Alcohol and Other Drug Studies. These platforms turn 15 curriculum sessions into a story the girls themselves get to tell, and that story is what brings the next cohort in the door.
Early outcomes and data
Two participants selected to speak at the state Prevention Day at the Capitol in Montgomery.
Two participants presented to an audience of more than 500 at the annual Bold Future Breakfast.
Pre- and post-curriculum evaluations completed with every cohort to measure knowledge and attitude change.
End-of-program surveys collected from school counselors and administrators at every host school.
Alumni tracked through Project Accelerate, the Girls Inc. college and career pipeline; one recent senior is enrolling at Yale University.
Third consecutive annual award from the Alabama Department of Mental Health opioid settlement, indicating sustained funder confidence in the model.
Monthly programmatic and financial reports submitted to the Alabama Department of Mental Health throughout each grant year.
Lessons Learned
Hire a dedicated person for the grant if you can. The grant is small, and the temptation is to spread the work across staff who already have full plates. The cohorts that run best are the ones where a coordinator has time on the calendar to be in the school, build parent relationships, attend school events, and respond when something comes up. Even a part-time line dedicated to the program is more effective than three people each giving it ten percent.
Build relationships before you build the program. Girls Inc. of Central Alabama has been in Birmingham since 1938. The reason counselors and principals say yes to the curriculum today is the sixty years of relationships that came before the grant. A replicator without that history should plan to spend a full year inside schools, on the United Way and Children’s Policy Council circuits, and at city events before launching the first cohort.
Run prevention as a club, not a classroom visit. The single most important structural decision is to run the curriculum as an opt-in club with parent consent and a consistent cohort. A one-off classroom talk does not change behavior. The club is what lets the fifteen sessions build on each other and what lets girls form the peer bonds that carry the message past the program.
Use needs assessments to choose where you go. Local data, including the community needs assessment, the United Way priority list, and the Children’s Policy Council reports, points to where the gap is biggest. Letting the data choose the first schools, rather than personal contacts or proximity to the office, gets the program in front of the girls who need it most and makes the funder's story easier to tell.
Find a public champion in local government. Mayor Randall Woodfin’s public support has opened doors that the agency could not open on its own. A replicator should identify the local elected official whose values align with prevention work, brief that office early, and invite them to program events. The champion is not a funder. The champion is an amplifier, and the amplification is what gets the next round of schools to say yes.