PACE celebrates 10 years of progress on high-risk drinking

The PACE Project, a campus-community coalition working to reduce the harms associated with high-risk drinking, is celebrating 10 years of progress.

Current and past coalition members will be on hand for a celebration meeting and presentation from 5-6:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 25, in the Ameritech Lounge of the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St.

Members of the media are welcome to attend the event and interview attendees.

Attendees will enjoy light refreshments, look back over 10 years of work and share ideas on continuing progress on this matter.

The event marks the end of the official funding period from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The university plans to continue the project, along with its existing goals and strategies of environmental policy change, with campus funds.

Although the city has had setbacks, such as recent Halloween disturbances and party school rankings, PACE Project director Susan Crowley says there have been hundreds of bright spots, with individual partners adopting the PACE model of policy changes around alcohol.

“The greatest success of the project has been the institutionalization of the response,” Crowley says. “If we ceased to exist today, our various partners would continue on with the work in the framework that we’ve helped establish.”

Crowley cited as an example the hiring of Joel Plant, the joint city-university alcohol policy coordinator addressing high-risk drinking in Madison. In addition, the Madison Police Department has been proactive in its own efforts, recently adding a new data analyst to help with these efforts.

Aaron Brower has been principal investigator on the grant since the beginning of the project in 1996.

“The academic environment can be slow to shift,” Brower says. “But I’ve seen a real sea change at UW–Madison over the last decade. The city and broader community have matched that change. We’ve made tremendous progress.”