NFIA
National Families in Action Accomplishments

1970s

National Families in Action (NFIA) founding board members Georgia State Senator Bud Stumbaugh and Georgia State Representative Cas Robinson author and introduce the nation’s first drug paraphernalia laws, which the Georgia Legislature passes in 1978. On March 3, 1982, the United States Supreme Court unanimously upholds the Model Drug Paraphernalia Law, which grows out of Georgia’s laws, and the rights of communities to pass such laws.

National Families in Action’s executive director and co-founder Sue Rusche writes the manual, How To Form a Families in Action Group in Your Community. The manual undergoes countless reprintings and helps thousands of parent groups form throughout the country.

Beginning in 1979 and continuing today, the work of National Families in Action is featured on Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Phil Donahue Show, CNN, and other major media outlets, as well as hundreds of smaller media markets. Over the years, articles about NFIA and its work appear frequently in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other large- and small-market newspapers.

1980s

National Families in Action testifies throughout the 1980s before several U.S. Congressional committees about the work of NFIA and the parent movement it helped create and lead.

Ms. Rusche writes a twice-weekly newspaper column about alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs that King Features syndicates to some 100 newspapers across the nation throughout the 1980s.

National Families in Action establishes a drug-education center that houses more than one million articles and documents related to all facets of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug abuse and addiction. The collection is used by parent groups, the media, and others.
National Families in Action organizes the Alcohol Task Force, led by volunteers Tom Peters, who later becomes a board member and president of the board and Paula Kemp, who later becomes NFIA’s executive vice president. The Alcohol Task Force researches sales to minors in DeKalb County and the lack of sanctions for stores convicted of this infraction, and advocates strengthening and enforcing existing laws. The Task Force report is published in several area high-school newsletters. Members of the sitting Grand Jury read it and make strong recommendations concerning the findings. Results bring an end “judge-shopping,” invoke a “wheel system” of randomly assigning cases to judges, and give judges the authority to revoke alcohol licenses from stores convicted of selling alcohol to minors.

1990s

National Families in Action’s Inner-City Families in Action Project is named an Exemplary Program by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

National Families in Action hosts American Cities Against Drugs, a conference which brings mayors from cities all over America together with experts in prevention, education, treatment, law enforcement, and science. More than 400 mayors sign the Atlanta Resolution rejecting drug legalization and committing to prevention, intervention, and treatment as ways to solve the drug problem plaguing their cities.

National Families in Action’s Club HERO, an after-school program for middle-school youth, is named a Promising Program by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) of the Department of Justice.

2000s

National Families in Action, in collaboration with Wake Forest University School of Medicine, creates the Addiction Studies Program for Journalists. Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the program conducts semiannual seminars for print and broadcast journalists to give them an understanding of the biomedical science that underlies drug abuse and addiction.

National Families in Action proposes the creation of the Parent Corps to build a new parent drug-prevention movement and wins a competitive, $4.2 million grant to initiate the Parent Corps in nine states. NFIA holds a competition for statewide nonprofit parent drug-prevention organizations and selects nine State Partners to bring the Parent Corps to their states. The grant funds 20 paid Parent Leaders, each working in their own child’s school. The funding agency, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), hires RTI International to conduct research on the effectiveness of the Parent Corps.

National Families in Action and Wake Forest University School of Medicine add two new partners, the Treatment Research Institute, Inc., at the University of Pennsylvania and the National Conference of State Legislatures, to create the Addiction Studies Program for State Legislatures. The National Institute on Drug Abuse funds this program as well.

National Families in Action creates and maintains the following websites:

www.nationalfamilies.org
www.parentcorps.org
www.addictionstudies.org