Since 1986, Ray Lozano has educated and entertained thousands of students in hundreds of middle schools and high schools from Alaska to Florida, and internationally in the Cayman Islands and Ethiopia, Africa. He has a talent and gift for conveying what could be construed as boring drug and alcohol prevention information in such a fun and humorous way that his audiences come away informed and entertained. The best analogy would be giving your kids medicine in a spoonful of sugar. There’s a good reason that his audiences feel like they just came back from the Improv rather than from a “lecture.” Ray Lozano has performed stand-up comedy at the Improv in Hollywood and Ontario, CA. It is his background in comedy that keeps his audiences coming back time and time again. The fact that he has been asked to return to some of the same schools across the nation, some for as long as 23 years, speaks to his ability to keep information updated, fresh, and relevant. Lozano’s varied experience professionally has equipped him to become the unique speaker that he is today. His career started out by being educated at the Teen Challenge Ministry Institute, where he saw firsthand the ravages of drug use in young adults. Upon graduation, he began working as a Site Director Assistant with Teen Challenge Imperial Valley. Having never used drugs or alcohol, this was an eye-opening experience to see firsthand the deleterious effects that drugs have on a young person. He saw how drugs stripped away a person’s full potential from what they could have achieved in life. From working with people fighting their way back from addiction, he realized he wanted to work with kids before they got involved in drugs and alcohol, which led him to his work in prevention. As a vice principal at a private elementary school, he launched a successful afterschool program with an emphasis on promoting a family-oriented, drug-free philosophy. Ray Lozano was the program specialist for the Youth Alternative Solutions at a major children’s hospital in southern California. YASP provided drug and alcohol awareness classes for youth ages 14-18 which helped to increase the adolescent’s knowledge of effects of drugs and alcohol on the body, consequences of risky behaviors, alternative choices, the addictive process m, and the self-efficacy of making life choices. The program’s hope is to help decrease the incidence of injury to adolescents and to provide positive behavioral choices, referrals, and various resources when needed. He is the founder, speaker, and trainer of Prevention Plus and is training youth and adults nationally and internationally in drug prevention, current drug information, and parenting skills in order to successfully help the child be drug free. Of note, Ray Lozano is very skilled at effective planning and implementation of community development with prevention strategies, extended project formatting, and organization growth and goal planning.
