Our Youth,
Our Future
Supporting the Health of Indigenous Youth
The Our Youth, Our Future (OYOF) study, conducted by the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research at Colorado State University, is the only national survey of substance use and related factors specifically focused on middle and high school students who live on or near Native American reservations in the continental United States.
OYOF’s primary mission is to provide up-to-date needed information about the health and well-being of reservation-area Indigenous youth to schools, tribal communities, and public health officials to support effective substance use prevention efforts.
About Us
With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research has been conducting the Our Youth, Our Future survey (previously the American Drug and Alcohol Survey) for approximately 40 years.
Each year, thousands of reservation-area middle and high school students across the nation participate in OYOF, providing critical data about their use of drugs and alcohol and the many factors that impact their choices to use or avoid using drugs.
OYOF is unique from other national school-based surveys as it is only administered to students enrolled in reservation or reservation-adjacent schools. OYOF provides each participating school with a tailored report of their findings, describing the overall types and levels of substance use in their schools, and the risk and protective factors impacting their students’ health behaviors.
These reports are used by schools, tribes, and community public health officials to raise awareness among funders and policymakers and to help identify effective prevention efforts and resources for reducing substance use and other health-risk behaviors.
Our Impacts
The Our Youth, Our Future project is the only national school-based survey of its kind and serves as the sole source of nationally-representative data on drug and alcohol use, along with associated risk and protective factors, in reservation-area Indigenous youth.
Despite having some of the highest substance use and other health risk disparities in the nation, this population is extremely underrepresented in national surveys of adolescent substance use.
- The OYOF survey provides participating schools and their communities with actionable insights into the nature of their students’ drug and alcohol use and the associated risk and protective factors that may influence use.
- At a national level, OYOF findings can offer researchers, prevention specialists, Native health advocates, and policymakers valuable information about substances of special concern, long-term trajectories, emerging substance use trends, and robust etiological evidence on which to base effective interventions.
