Alcohol culture change projects

Overview

We have evaluated two key Alcohol Culture Change projects as part of VicHealth’s Alcohol Culture Change Initiative: What’s Your Story? and Youth Action Against Risky Drinking.

What's Your Story?

This project involved evaluating the What’s your story project, led by the City of Port Phillip, City of Melbourne, and the City of Stonnington. The What’s your story project collected many stories from young adults (aged 18-24 years) in Melbourne’s night-time entertainment precincts. The project promoted stories across a range of channels to drive positive change in the local community, such as social media, the arts, advertising and local venues.

Youth Action Against Risky Drinking

We evaluated the City of Whittlesea’s Youth Action Against Risky Drinking project. This project included setting up a ‘social lab’ to facilitate an environment in which young people (aged 14-17) were able to explore their understandings of alcohol culture. It involved recruiting local young people and partner organisations for a co-design team to implement a series of project activity. To tackle risky drinking practices, the social lab participants developed a range of creative responses such as, animations and imagery, messaging and a narrative strategy for a social media campaign on SnapChat, and a short documentary about the impacts of big liquor outlets.

Insights generated through these projects is supporting the development of new initiatives to address drinking cultures. For instance, VicHealth featured these projects as exemplars in their recently released Alcohol Cultures Guide. This guide will support health promotion practitioners, local government policy makers and community organisations to take action on risky drinking cultures.