Collaborate Collaborate Collaborate!
Yesterday was Postvention Alliance’s first public outing with other suicide prevention stakeholders in Mesa County, Colorado. It was hard to decide which tables we would sit at, as all of our board members and advisers also work with other stakeholder advocacy organizations. Mesa County put on a very informative event about their work with the Colorado National Collaborative, which gave us all good direction for future planning and collaborative efforts. We were given a chance to highlight the upcoming men’s resilience strategies event - a collaborative effort between Postvention Alliance, St. Mary’s Hospital Suicide Prevention Office, Colorado State Suicide Prevention Office, Grand Junction Veteran’s Administration, Men’s Work, HopeWest Hospice, Heartbeat of Grand Junction, Christine Holmfelt MSW, Dr. Jeffrey Turre, Moving Beyond Services, NAMI Western Slope, Cabela’s, RAW Canvas, and Andy’s Barber Shop. This morning’s presentation was a truly enlightening experience.
Janice,
Postvention Alliance Vice President and Moving Beyond Services peer group leader, sat with the Community Connections group. The gorgeous infographic highlights a collaboration between Moving Beyond Services and the Counseling and Education Center as well as Postvention Alliance’s collaboration with the Western Colorado Alliance West Slope Youth Vote interns. The infographic represents a small taste of what’s to come in the Postvention Alliance plan to gather data for open publication.
Shannon,
Postvention Alliance’s harm reduction adviser, Positive Women’s Network Western Slope Advocate, and Host Homes Program Manager Karis Inc. dba The House - chose to sit the Postvention table and represent Positive Women’s Network. We nearly got up and danced when we heard that St. Mary’s Hospital is now providing naloxone and suboxone to overdose survivors.
Erica,
Postvention Alliance secretary, WCA legislative committee member, AFSP field advocate, and resident data nerd, sat with Shannon at the Postvention table, and represented Postvention Alliance. She talked about how alliance goals for research parity, along with our nothing-about-us-without-us priority of gathering survivor driven and derived data, aligns closely with Chicago Beyond research priorities for underrepresented community members.
Darrell & Jeff,
Postvention Alliance President & Board Member at Large are survivor advocates from the word go. In the next quarterly update you’ll read about the men’s event, some research outcomes, and how ice cream certificates plays into men’s health.
Data
This morning AFSP National Survivor Day organizers published the data from attendees during 2019 Survivor Day! Here are some brief points from the surveys:
What are the primary reasons you chose to participate?
* To learn about healing/coping with suicide loss - 58.09%
* To connect with other loss survivors in the community- 70.85%
* To share what I learned about suicide and/or suicide loss with colleagues, patients, clients- 24.68%
Please describe how the overall event or a particular activity helped your healing journey.
* I felt that attending Survivor Day was worthwhile - 92% chose agree or strongly agree
* I would recommend attending Survivor Day to family, friends, and/or other loss survivors - 93% chose agree or strongly agree
art
We received a grant from the Grand Junction Arts Commission to offer a resiliency workshop in late spring for at-risk youth. Whoop! Details coming soon!