Open almost any grant application, needs assessment, or community profile in our field, and you'll find the same rhythm.

Risk factor. Risk factor. Risk factor.

Those risks are real. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But here's the thing — when that's the only story we tell about a community, we're not just describing a problem. We're teaching people what to believe about themselves.

That's where my conversation with Barbara Bessette starts on this week's episode of the Prevention Leaders Podcast — and honestly, it's one of those conversations that rearranged a few things in my head.

Barbara has been in prevention for almost 22 years. She's an enrolled member of the Chippewa-Cree Tribe, Rocky Boy, based in Great Falls, Montana, and she spent roughly six years as the tribal technical assistance lead for Prevention Support Services — the person connecting the dots between what tribal prevention specialists were actually doing on the ground and what funders understood about it.

Her core message is simple to say and much harder to practice: culture is prevention.

"Native culture is coming from protective factors"

Barbara is careful about definitions, and I appreciated that. Culture isn't only race or ethnicity. She lives in a town with an Air Force base — that's a culture. Her two local high schools have cultures. She comes from a rodeo and ranching family. Montana itself is a culture.

"You're not just one culture," she said near the end of our conversation. "You're a million different things put together."

But the lens she brings is Indigenous — and from that lens, the deficit framing we default to in prevention lands very differently.

"Everything is about risk factors," she told me. "And I understand that there is a time and place for those. But where Native culture is coming from is at protective factors, and those are really important to build on."

I shared my own version of this. When I was in my darkest days with mental health and addiction, every message I saw about veterans was problem-first: PTSD rates, suicide statistics, all of it. It didn't inspire me to reach out. It layered on shame. It made me think, this is just my new normal.

Barbara's response stuck with me: "There's actually a huge science behind hope. Because when you have hope, you can have goals, and you feel like you have a future."

What culturally grounded prevention actually looks like

This is where the episode gets practical, because "center culture" can easily collapse into tokenism. Barbara's line for that is blunt: it's not "here's some pictures of American Indians, and so now it's culturally competent."

A few examples she shared that show the difference:

Events people actually attend. Barbara once organized a week-long prevention series with panels and film screenings. Average attendance: about five people a day. Meanwhile, a prevention specialist on one of Montana's larger reservations runs a Trunk or Treat and sees thousands. "When you're bringing people what they want and what they feel seen in, they will come."
The Rocky Boy youth center. Not just a drop-in space — a comprehensive health facility with prenatal care, an industrial kitchen, laundry, basketball, a dance studio. Every room is named in Cree. The clinic doors are covered with photographs of ancestors in regalia from 50, 60, 70 years ago. Western services, delivered through an Indigenous lens.
Smudge the Rez. Community members riding through the villages on horseback, smudging with sweetgrass and sage. Barbara calls it one of her favorite prevention activities she's ever been part of — because of what it did for people to feel seen.
A 2009 recovery powwow. Two days of substance-free celebration, recovery dances, people telling their stories. Still, 17 years later, one of the best things she's done in her career.

Notice what these have in common. Not a program name. Relationships, belonging, and a reason to show up.

The part of the episode I keep thinking about

At a Native SAPST training in 2021, a facilitator ran an exercise. Sweetgrass in the center of the room, representing culture. Participants arranged in rings around it: children, then mothers, then fathers, then grandparents, then community.

Then the facilitator starts removing pieces. Culture first — the way boarding schools did. Then the children. Then everything.

Barbara, a 20-year prevention professional and a trainer herself, thought it would just be an activity.

"I seriously was crying by the end," she said. "It was the first time in my life that I was like, oh — that's the feeling I feel at times."

That's the emotional center of this episode, and it's the clearest possible argument that culture isn't a decorative layer on prevention work. It's load-bearing.

Three things you can take back to your team

Audit your language. Pull one grant narrative, one presentation, or one program description. Where are you naming systems and conditions as the risk — access barriers, discrimination, historical trauma — versus implying that identity itself is the risk factor? Those are very different sentences.
"Nothing about us without us." Barbara names this as the single most common mistake well-meaning teams make: designing for a community without inviting that community in. The course correction isn't complicated. Invite them. Early. And build for sustainability — one of her specialists handed her LGBTQ+ fun run over to the local chapter two years in, and it's still running.
Define culture in behaviors, not symbols. Elders at the table. Language on the walls. Family as the unit, not just the individual. When Barbara was asked which protective factor we most underestimate, her answer was family — the whole extended web of it.

Listen to the full conversation

We covered a lot more than fits here — how Barbara built one-on-one channels with funders so tribal work was actually visible, why partnerships between tribal and county prevention teams exploded once someone was connecting the dots, what she wishes funders would do before writing another template (spoiler: spend real time on a reservation), and her definition of culture as prevention that she'd never had to put into words before.

That definition alone is worth the listen: "Using your strengths and those things that people can't take away from you, even if they try — and using that as a positive and not a negative."

🎧 Listen to the full episode of the Prevention Leaders Podcast with Barbara Bessette — and then send it to one colleague, coalition partner, or funder who needs to hear it.

Because prevention is better together. And before you label a community by its risks, name its protective factors — and build from there.

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Culture Is Prevention: What Changes When We Lead With Protective Factors