Initiative Impact
Section contents:
Impact Overview
Impact Story
Impact Overview
BSAN has shown great success in its first year. The initiative’s key successes fall into a few categories, further detailed below.
Naloxone Training Distribution
Over the past year, BSAN has provided 11 different naloxone (brand name Narcan) training events. Naloxone is an over the counter medication that reverses opioid overdoses. Given the near 100,000 overdose deaths every year in the United States, naloxone administration has become a recommended addition to everyone’s first aid skills. Through our events, we have distributed 2,000+ doses of naloxone. We regard this a major milestone, with each of these doses representing a potential life saved.
Educational Presentations
BSAN has also delivered over seven educational presentations across campus, with audiences ranging from the Purdue Sports Management team, to the Purdue Student Government Board of Directors, to the Pharmacy Student council. These presentations focus on the topic of SUD stigma, root causes of addiction, and harm reduction practices. In addition to these presentations, BSAN hosted a Kickoff and Summer Send Off event, bringing in guest speakers from the addiction medicine field and speakers with lived experience with SUD. These events offered unique and valuable perspectives into SUD, thus allowing the near 70 attendees among the two events to gain deeper insight into the effects of SUD. Our educational presentations and tabling events have reached an estimated 4,700+ people on Purdue’s campus.
Network Building and Outreach
BSAN has worked extensively to establish connections with Purdue community members, Purdue organizations, and external organizations. We have gained a large following with 288 email list subscribers and over 1,500 Instagram followers. Additionally, we have recruited 50 active volunteers for our tabling events that have been crucial to our successes thus far.
We have also completed collaboration events with 11 different Purdue organizations, including another Lead Forward team - Arts for the Hearts, and worked with seven different external organizations to guide our educational efforts, such as Overdose Lifeline, IU ECHO, SOAR WV, and the Tippecanoe Health Department.
Recently, BSAN also was featured in the Purdue Exponent newspaper. We were interviewed about the origin of BSAN and our current initiatives, thus allowing us to further share our mission with the Purdue community.
Novel Educational Mediums
BSAN has also begun to experiment with sharing SUD education via novel educational mediums. We competed in the Purdue Innovates Moonshot Pitch Competition, detailing our idea for a virtual reality SUD stigma reduction training, and won first place in our category for this idea. Furthermore, we made a podcast on the history of naloxone policy for the Purdue CCSE Podcast Competition and won first place in our category as well.
Research
Given that BSAN is the first documented SUD anti-stigma campaign on a university campus, we also have placed emphasis on conducting research. We gained IRB approval for a study on the knowledge and perceptions of SUD on Purdue’s campus and are currently collecting data as co-principal investigators. Additionally, we have an accepted article manuscript on BSAN’s growth in the Purdue Journal of Service and International Engagement. We hope that both of these publications can help contribute to the literature on SUD education and inform future efforts.
Initiative Sustainability
We have also written a constitution to transition BSAN into a registered club for the 2025-26 school year, allowing us to recruit club members, increase engagement, and set up BSAN as a long-term initiative. The other co-fellows and I conducted interviews and selected three additions for the BSAN team who will serve as club officers next year.
Image of BSAN presentation to Purdue Student Government
Image of BSAN Kickoff event speaker panel
Image of BSAN Save A Life Day, an national event
coordinated by SOAR WV
Image of a spring BSAN tabling event
Image of BSAN presentation at Tippecanoe
Health Department meeting
Image of BSAN x Arts for the Heart
Waffle Bar Collaboration
Image of a BSAN "Myth Buster" Instagram Post
Image of BSAN Exponent article in print
Image of BSAN Moonshot Pitch presentation
Impact Story
My impact story revolves around a gradual shift in perspective I observed in a student.
During our first tabling event back in September, we had two tables on campus. For the first part of the event, we mainly encountered people with positive or neutral attitudes towards naloxone, which bolstered our confidence as a new organization just getting started in naloxone distribution. About halfway through the event, we were met with our first negative attitude towards naloxone. I was not at the table where this interaction occurred but was able to hear about it from another co-fellow.
This student approached the table and appeared to hold a strong belief that naloxone distribution was unnecessary as substance use was purely a matter of ‘self-control’. They also doubted the facts and statistics that our impact mentor at the table brought up regarding the nature of substance use disorder and the scale of the opioid epidemic.
During our tabling event in November, after starting a discussion with a table attendee, I recognized that this attendee was the same person as from that first tabling event. They asked about how relevant the issue of substance use is in Indiana and on college campuses, saying that the issue was just centralized to certain areas of the US, mainly cities. Having prepared more statistics after having heard about my co-fellow’s previous experience, I cited the high amount of illicit substance use present in rural Indiana and on college campuses, with 20% of college students reporting having used an illicit substance in the past month, significantly increasing the risk of laced substances and overdoses. While they seemed receptive to this statistic, they were not quite convinced. I decided to take inspiration from our anti-stigma quote booklet and mentioned a few stories, such as a young adult taking a substance at a party for the first time and suffering the unfair consequence of death. I think that sharing real-life stories made a difference, with this student commenting something along the lines of "I see your point." They left the table without having taken any naloxone, but this experience struck me as I did not think that this student would be as open to these points as they were given their past comments.
In March, this student approached our table again. They seemed to be on their way to class but still decided to stop by. I was prepared to start another discussion but, much to my surprise, they simply asked if they could have a dose of naloxone.
I regarded this interaction as a major milestone in BSAN’s work. This experience illuminated to me the impact of the work BSAN is doing. Through providing regular tabling events offering discussions on substance use, we can change perceptions. While through these discussions with this student we always affirmed their perspective, we stood resolute in our perspective and encouraged a civil discourse.
I think that while bringing up different points, statistics, and stories in this conversation was very helpful but overall, the most significant factor may have been time. A lot of time passed in between the tabling events this student attended, allowing this student to reflect more deeply on what we mentioned at the tabling events. Attending multiple events allowed this student to gain additional insights that shaped their reflection and supported a perspective change. This perspective shift resulted in action too, with the student deciding to take the naloxone, 6 months after their first interaction with BSAN. Ultimately, this is exactly what BSAN wants to do - educate students thereby facilitating perspective change that elicits necessary actions to combat SUD at large.