NCPG Highlights Community Role Ahead of Problem Gambling Awareness Month

by Kevin Lentz, 20 January 2026

Problem Gambling Awareness Month was designed to coincide with peak sports betting, and to use that attention for prevention.

Gambling is increasingly available everywhere © sarangib, Pixabay

Key Facts:

• PGAM runs each March alongside increased sports betting activity.
• NCPG encourages flexible, locally driven participation.
• The 2026 theme will emphasize community-based support models.
• Awareness efforts extend beyond just operators and regulators.

March may mean college basketball, but it also means Problem Gambling Awareness Month (PGAM). What was once just a week-long initiative to address the risks associated with sports betting around March Madness has grown into a full-scale month-long program aimed at raising awareness of problem gambling in all its forms.

The principal organiser of PGAM is the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG), which launched the first awareness campaign in 2003 and now partners with other responsible gaming advocacy groups across the country to spread the word. In 2026, the organization is urging health care providers to screen clients for signs of problem gambling.

March Matters

Dickinson once said, “March is a month of expectation.” and NCPG spokesperson Cait Huble seemed to echo those sentiments in a recent seminar. She pointed out that her organization uses the hyped awareness around the men’s college basketball tournament and sports betting during the month to help better raise awareness around the issues of problem gambling.

While this worked well even in 2003, it’s even more relevant today, as more than three dozen US states now allow sports betting and will see tens of millions of dollars in wagers on the NCAA tournament, whose first games begin on March 17th.

“Caring Communities-Stronger Futures”

This year’s theme is also more inclusive than ever, calling on communities across the country to define for themselves what prevention, education, and especially support should look like at the local level, in a shift away from a one-size-fits-all message.

This flexibility is a feature, not a bug. It encourages participants as diverse as say a lottery retailer to a college campus to a senior care center and this year even health care providers to think about how they can help their members and clients address a serious behavioral issue that affects an estimated five to eight million US residents, with more than two million of those having a severe problem.

Moving Beyond Checklists

So this year, there are no mandatory activities and no set benchmarks. Instead, PGAM has stepped away from rigid participation requirements and encourages everyone to consider training staff, hosting discussions or simply reducing the stigma that many who struggle with problem gambling often face.

Huble says that even the smallest of steps such as starting a conversation or sharing a helpful resource can help build long-term change, thus this year’s emphasis on sustainability over some performative-type tasks.

Broader Shifts In Responsible Gaming

This is not a one-off. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have also recently been drawing more attention to community-based approaches for many behavioural health issues, including problem gambling. So, PGAM aligning with this guidance is simply focusing on the environment these at-risk people live and work in, rather than just their individual behaviour.

No longer are just casino operators and state regulators being forced to tackle this problem alone as prevention efforts begin to focus on communities’ shared responsibility to keep their members from harm.

Awakening Awareness

While each PGAM campaign is meant to move the dial incrementally, the longer-term goal is to build out infrastructure to tackle this issue holistically. By encouraging these many types of communities to face the problem on their own terms, the hope is to create conditions where people facing gambling-related harm can both find help and feel more supported when seeking it out.

As wagering continues to grow both in the real world and the digital one, and prediction markets allow people in all fifty states to bet on essentially anything, it’s this community-first approach that many believe will be just as important as all the regulation and rules written to keep people safe from the rapidly encroaching gamblification of everything.