Contact Name: Lauren Joyce Contact Number: 07912269182 Contact Email: Lauren@haga.co.uk
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Local alcohol service sparks cross-borough debate this Alcohol Awareness Week
This Alcohol Awareness Week, Haringey Advisory Group on Alcohol (HAGA) is hitting the streets of Barnet, Haringey and Islington to encourage people to have a conversation about alcohol. Local people will be invited to get on their soapbox and shout out their public thoughts, or to anonymously share their more private thoughts, about alcohol. As well as inciting debate about “booze Britain,” HAGA hope to create a more intimate debate about individual’s true feelings about alcohol. The debate will be brought to a wider audience through Twitter accounts documenting the public and private thoughts shared on the streets, and encouraging others to contribute online.
Alcohol Awareness Week—an annual event led by Alcohol Concern, the leading alcohol campaigning charity—will be running from 18-24 November 2013. The focus of this year’s activity is encouraging people to think about how alcohol affects us as individuals, families, communities and a society. Lauren Joyce, Brief Intervention Specialist at HAGA, who is coordinating these local debates stated ‘Alcohol Awareness Week provides an unrivalled platform to encourage residents, employees and service-users to have a conversation about alcohol’.
In Islington, 22% (37,100) of residents do not drink sensibly. Islington has the fifth highest rate of alcohol-attributable crime in London. Over half of all reported domestic violence cases in the borough are alcohol-related. To improve this local picture, greater awareness and earlier intervention is needed which is very much emphasised in national and local alcohol strategies. For example, did you know that a “binge” is only drinking double your recommended daily allowance i.e. two large glasses of 12% wine for a female or two and a half pints of 5% beer for a male.
To help local residents find out whether their drinking is risky, HAGA run an alcohol screening, advice and referral website www.dontbottleitup.org.uk. HAGA also has an iPhone app, DrinkCoach www.drinkcoach.org.uk which puts Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness techniques for tracking and changing drinking into people’s hands.
If you want to get involved in the local Islington debate, visit us at Islington Town Hall on Thursday 21st November from 11am to 2pm. You can also follow the public debate at ShoutItOut_AAW or the private debate at ShareIt_AAW.
Photo opportunity:
See attached to this email some DontBottleItUp artwork or visit our Shout It Out and Share It stall (details above).
Interview opportunity:
Please call or email to arrange an interview with myself or visit the stall itself and interview people we are interacting with on the day.
www.haga.co.uk
www.dontbottleitup.org.uk
www.drinkcoach.org.uk
Twitter:
ShoutItOut_AAW
ShareIt_AAW
haga_alcohol
dontbottleitup_