01940 Winter 2021_Reduced

WINTER 2021 | 31
Helping hands
for a healthier
Lynnfield
BY ALENA KUZUB
Peg Sallade is a substance-use prevention coordinator and organizer for A Healthy Lynnfield.
PHOTO: SPENSER HASAK
When Lynnfield took a step
to proactively address the
opioid epidemic and formed
its Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition,
known as A Healthy Lynnfield (AHL),
the town hired Margaret “Peg” Sallade,
a designated substance-abuse prevention
coordinator.
With her knowledge and years of
experience with public-health campaigns,
community partnerships and substance-use
prevention, Sallade is the engine and the
glue behind AHL. That said, she is very
modest and strictly business when it comes to
describing her role in the coalition.
“Selectman [Phil] Crawford gets the
credit for originally convening the group.
He looked around and understood that
many coalitions on the North Shore
had community-health partnerships and
Lynnfield did not and really called the
community together initially to address the
opiate crisis,” said Sallade. “And then, to keep
the group going and to really put together a
local plan, they brought me in, and we did
some grant writing and some convening
and building of the partnership with people
around the table to address substance-use
prevention in Lynnfield.”
Sallade grew up in a very small, rural town
in the Catskills in New York.
“I think that’s shaped my sense of
community and really working to give back to
the community throughout my life,” she said.
She went to the Pennsylvania State
University and earned a degree in health
education. Sallade spent the first years after
college doing work-site health promotion
with a company in Boston. Her job included
cholesterol screenings, blood-pressure
screenings, and work-site wellness-program
offerings.
After six years in corporate-health
promotion, she decided to move to
community-based health. Sallade attributes
her interest in substance-use prevention to
a course on alcoholism she took in college.
That course was based on research by E.M.
Jellinek, who was responsible for looking at
the disease model of substance use.
Sallade remembers going to Alcoholics
Anonymous (AA) meetings as a part of
her class curriculum. She was struck by a
realization of how misframed alcoholism was
in the public because it was not known as a
disease. That sparked her interest in being
able to help individuals who had a substanceuse
disorder.
In the early 1990s, Sallade started working
for the Center for Addictive Behaviors in