Seeking Innovative Ideas for Reducing Community Alcohol Problems

Baroness Helen Newlove is a remarkable person. After her husband was beaten to death by drunken yobs in front of her children, she became an advocate for victims of crime. Unusually for someone from a modest class background, she was subsequently ennobled and now sits in the UK House of Lords.

I am helping her on her latest initiative, and am now asking the innovative minds of the RBC community for their best thoughts on how it might succeed. In collaboration with Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles, Bns Newlove has launched a fund to support innovative projects that reduce underage and binge drinking, which are damaging public health, public safety and quality of life in much of the UK.

You can read the criteria here, but to summarize the key points, imagine you were a community facing alcohol problems and had a shot at a grant of about 50,000 pounds to help you respond. You would be required to bring in multiple collaborators: teachers, pub owners, parents, teenagers, doctors, law enforcement etc. But beyond that there are few constraints on what you could propose as long as it seemed to stand a chance of reducing underage and binge drinking.

What would you propose to do?