Under the auspices of Minister of High Education Dr. Hassan Diab, a graduation ceremony for the trainers of Building Blocks program was held on Monday March 4th from 11:00 am to 12:30pm at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Hamra, Beirut.
Building Blocks is an international evidence-based drug prevention program developed by the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), that mainly targets children between the age of 3 and 6, their parents, and the educators.
Mentor Arabia obtained the copyrights of the program, translated the material and adapted it to the Arab context. The implementation of Building Blocks started in Lebanon as a pilot project for the Arab region in partnership with the Woman Program Association (WPA), by training 21 trainers on the program in Borj El Barajneh Camp. The future implementation of the program will be in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and hopefully in the rest of the Arab world.
Building Blocks aims at establishing a pool of qualified trainers to train early childhood educators, thus introduce the program in kindergartens with the children and parents at a later stage. The main objective of the program is to introduce healthy life-style behavior to make the children less vulnerable to take drugs in the future.
