Positive impacts drive the San Luis Obispo Friday Night Live program as local youth educate and encourage their peers to avoid underage drinking during April, Alcohol Awareness Month.
Katherine Gross is a SLO County Friday Night Live program coordinator and oversees Shandon Middle and High schools, Santa Lucia School, and Coast Unified School District. But the program isn’t specific to SLO County.
Friday Night Live, not to be confused with the National Football League or Friday Night Lights, Gross said with a laugh, is a state-run youth development program, similar to a student club, with each county being run a bit differently than the other, Gross said. In some areas, the program operates through the county education office, but in SLO, it’s through Behavioral Health.
“We tend to focus on mental health, substance prevention, leadership, skill building, and advocacy with our youth,” Gross said, “and our goals also include creating a safe environment and building meaningful relationships with youth, providing a space for them to feel accepted and work on, like, event planning and campus climate, as well as creating opportunities for them to get involved with their communities.”
According to Gross, Friday Night Live started in the 1980s through the state Office of Traffic Safety, designed to combat underage drinking. Then in the ’90s, it incorporated substance prevention. In the 2000s, it added mental health.
Through the statewide partnership, counties apply for grants to run specific campaigns based on the student body’s needs. In the case of Shandon High, Gross said, the campaign this school year is “positive social norms.”
“It’s in collaboration with the partnership, as well as being funded through the Office of Traffic Safety, and they tend to focus their efforts on prevention of underage drinking and drinking under the influence,” Gross said. “And Shandon High, they were like, ‘Oh, we have a big need to shift the norm around underage drinking on campus. A lot of students think that it’s really cool, and we think that a lot of students are out there like drinking and partying and not really aware of the consequences.'”
SLO Friday Night Live operates like a typical high school club with a group of students running meetings and campaign efforts to further a cause. In this case, students at Shandon High have been creating posters and social media posts to spread awareness about the dangers of underage drinking.
But rather than trying to scare youth out of drinking, Gross said the group is taking the “positive impact” approach.
“Rather than using fear-based tactics, they try to share things like, “Oh look, the majority of students on campus actually don’t think that it’s cool and don’t use alcohol,'” she said. “So, we’re just, like, getting that messaging out to let them know … the minority who are using alcohol tend to talk about it a lot, and maybe people think that that’s how you fit in, but the majority of students really don’t use it.”
SLO Friday Night Live’s Instagram is filled with graphics that say, “We all win by getting home safe,” and “April is Alcohol Awareness Month,” to spread the world throughout the community before its resource fair on May 1, Gross said.
The group also makes itself present on campus.
“They also had an interactive poster, and some to give away,” Gross said. “And next, they’re wanting to put some posters around their community.”
Any student is able to join, Gross said, adding that the program provides multiple incentives like receiving community service credit and attending an annual conference in LA that includes a day at Disneyland.
“But yeah, that’s just one of the ways that we try to kind of keep engagement and keep opportunities for youth to have some incentives to continue coming to the club, since they are not required to stay,” she said.
In recent years, Gross said the program issues an annual survey to determine how impactful the program is for students.
“It’s been pretty consistently showing over the years that students have been able to learn more leadership skills, and that could be anything from public speaking to learning how to write a résumé to learning about self-care or substance prevention,” she said. “We have a wide umbrella that we are able to show up and provide with our youth.”
For more information, visit slofnl.com.
Fast fact
• The Morro Bay National Estuary Program, in partnership with the San Luis Obispo chapters of The Wildlife Society and the California Native Plant Society, is hosting the 2025 City Nature Challenge in SLO County from April 25 to 28. Participants are encouraged to go outside and make observations like photos of a plant, animal, mushroom, or nearly any other living creature. For more information, visit citynaturechallenge.org. Δ
Reach Staff Writer Libbey Hanson at lhanson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Apr 17-27, 2025.