Members of Battle Ground’s DREAM Team earned first runner-up honors at the 2026 Washington State Spring Youth Forum after presenting their student-led wellness conference, capping a year of prevention work that included legislative advocacy, community service and youth leadership.
Members of the youth leadership program, which operates through Prevent Together: Battle Ground Prevention Alliance, earned a $1,000 scholarship to attend the Washington State Prevention Summit this fall as part of their statewide honors.
The Washington State Health Care Authority-hosted Spring Youth Forum brings together youth prevention teams from across the state to showcase projects promoting healthy choices, mental wellness and substance use prevention. Forty-two teams participated this year and were judged on innovation, collaboration, sustainability, impact and professionalism.
The DREAM Team presentation, delivered by Tukes Valley Middle School students Josephine Malvini, Rye Dilley, Sam Billups, Dani Brissler-Arionus and Eugenia Osei-Nimoh, highlighted the second annual Prevention Convention, held in March at Washington State University Vancouver. Planned entirely by middle school students from Tukes Valley and Pleasant Valley middle schools in the Battle Ground Public Schools District, the conference welcomed nearly 125 students for workshops centered on emotional, social and physical wellness. Over the past two years, nearly 300 students have participated in the event, a news release by Battle Ground Prevention Alliance stated.
Jennifer Kirby, executive director of Prevent Together: Battle Ground Prevention Alliance, said the recognition reflected years of work by the students.
"It kind of is culminating all of the years of work that these students have put in," Kirby said. "They were presenting on a project that they've worked on over two years, so really for all of the hard work that they've put in over the last two years on designing and developing Prevention Convention: The Way to Wellness, which is a conference designed specifically for middle school students by middle school students. ... We value trying to let the youth lead, and this is just an example of how they've done that, and quite successfully."
Tukes Valley Middle School student Rye Dilley said the project has defined his experience with the DREAM Team since joining at the beginning of sixth grade.
"My whole time in the Dream Team over the last two years has been really taken up by putting together this project," Dilley said. "The first year in 2025 was full of a lot of trial and error, and we learned what worked and what didn't, and we ended up still putting on a spectacular event in March 2025, and then we were able to bring it back the next year, and it was even bigger and better."
Survey results following the conference showed students left feeling more confident in the wellness skills taught throughout the day, Dilley said.
"We really pushed the limits of what some people expect that a small youth team from Battle Ground can do," he said. "We put on a full-fledged conference that over two years brought together nearly 300 students from across the area."
While the statewide award marked a milestone, the students remained active in the community throughout the year.
In January, DREAM Team members traveled to Olympia for the American Heart Association's Lobby Day, where they met with lawmakers to advocate for eliminating flavored tobacco sales and increasing the state cigarette tax to support youth tobacco prevention programs.
The team also partnered with Prevent Together, the Battle Ground Police Department, the city of Battle Ground and Cascadia Technical Academy's Criminal Justice program during National Prescription Drug Take Back Day in April. During the four-hour event, 124 residents safely disposed of 435 pounds of unwanted and expired medications while volunteers distributed medication lock boxes. The effort contributed to more than 9,600 pounds of medications collected locally over the last nine and a half years.
Kirby said community partnerships have become central to the program's success.
"I always like to talk about community collaboration," she said. "This one initiative as a whole has brought together a lot of community collaboration around just the effort of promoting awareness around the prevention of substance use."
Dilley said collaboration also defines how the approximately 75-member DREAM Team operates.
"Our mission and our organization is really successful thanks to collaboration," he said. "If you look at any event that we put on or any initiative that we involve ourselves in, it's a collaborative effort with multiple other organizations and groups."
The first runner-up finish also earned the team an opportunity to attend this fall's Washington State Prevention Summit in Tacoma with the scholarship able to go towards hotel rooms for the students.
Although Dilley has never attended the conference, he said he is eager to continue learning alongside his teammates.
"I'm always enthusiastic to learn something new, and I'm always enthusiastic to enjoy time with my team and my friends," he said. "I'm really just looking forward to continuing to expand on this wonderful organization, this really family that we've built in the last two years."
Kirby said the summit has historically inspired many of the DREAM Team's projects, including the Prevention Convention itself.
"The networking is what helped inspire what Rye was talking about," Kirby said. "We had taken some youth a few years back, and on the van ride home, we got to talking about, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we had some sort of a wellness fair. That was the idea of the Prevention Convention initially."
For Dilley, the statewide recognition ultimately belonged to far more students than the five presenters who represented Battle Ground.
"While we were the five students ... we couldn't have done it without the support of the other 75 DREAM Team members," he said. "We build each other up. One of our DREAM Team students wouldn't be what they are without all of the other DREAM Team members around them supporting them."
