The Prevention Leaders Podcast
Culture Is Prevention: Protective Factors, Belonging, and Strength-Based Prevention with Barbara Bessette
47 min
Guest: Barbara Bessette
Listen on SpotifySummary
This episode of The Prevention Leaders Podcast features Dave Closson and Barbara Bessette, an enrolled member of the Chippewa-Cree Tribe Rocky Boy. They explore how reconnecting with culture, identity, belonging, and community can be a powerful substance misuse prevention strategy. Bessette shares her insights on approaching prevention through an Indigenous lens, emphasizing protective factors and moving beyond deficit-based narratives.
Key takeaways
- Culture, identity, connection, and belonging serve as protective factors in substance misuse prevention.
- Prevention efforts can benefit from shifting from risk-only narratives to strength-based approaches that recognize existing community strengths.
- Involving the people being served from the beginning is crucial for culturally grounded prevention work.
- Funders and grantmakers should understand and support culturally grounded prevention strategies.
- Community events like recovery powwows and youth centers can support prevention outcomes by fostering hope, family, and community connection.
Show notes
What if one of the most powerful prevention strategies isn’t another program, but helping people reconnect with culture, identity, belonging, and community?
In this episode of the Prevention Leaders Podcast, Dave Closson talks with Barbara Bessette, a prevention professional with more than two decades of experience in substance misuse prevention, tribal prevention support, cultural technical assistance, and community-based prevention work in Montana.
Barbara is an enrolled member of the Chippewa-Cree Tribe Rocky Boy and brings a powerful perspective on what it means to approach prevention through an Indigenous lens, not by focusing only on risk factors, but by recognizing the protective factors already present in communities.
Together, Dave and Barbara explore why culture is prevention, how prevention teams can move beyond deficit-based narratives, and what it looks like to make prevention work truly culturally grounded, not just culturally decorated.
They also discuss the importance of relationships, trust, family, elders, language, community events, and the simple but powerful principle: nothing about us without us.
In this episode, we talk about:
- Why risk-only narratives can reinforce shame, stigma, and hopelessness
- How culture, identity, connection, and belonging function as protective factors
- What prevention can learn from tribal communities and Indigenous prevention work
- The role of cultural technical assistance in supporting prevention specialists
- Why funders and grantmakers need to better understand culturally grounded prevention
- How community events like recovery powwows, youth centers, and “Smudge the Rez” can support prevention outcomes
- Why prevention teams should involve the people they are trying to serve from the very beginning
- How hope, family, and community connection can help shift prevention from deficit-based to strength-based
Key takeaway
Prevention gets stronger when we stop defining communities only by their risks and start building from their strengths.
Culture is not an add-on. It is not just symbols, colors, or surface-level representation. Culture can be a living source of identity, connection, belonging, hope, and healing, and those are powerful protective factors.
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