Getting Started

2. Take Action

Information from your research, from the people you talked to, and from the environmental scan is then applied to:

• Create a felt need, passion or concern about suicide prevention as an important community issue which needs to be addressed.
• Organize an initial community meeting.
• Determine the structure and composition of the meeting.
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the community to prioritize the suicide prevention activities.
• Help to craft the message to broaden the coalition and create community buy-in and motivation.
• Adapt the Florida Toolkit and Resource Guide: Reducing Suicide in Your Community to fit the needs of that particular community.
• Establishing next steps and roles and responsibilities for moving them along.

You may learn about prior and planned suicide prevention efforts by talking to people in your community. Some of the questions you might ask are:

1. What do you see as the major suicide risks in this community/school/town/church/etc?
2. What actions have been taken to prevent suicide?
3. What actions are planned?
4. Who is involved?
5. Who was not involved but would have been helpful if they had participated?
6. What are some of the challenges you encountered or anticipate will be encountered?

Before identifying solutions, your team needs a common understanding of the issues, and a shared mission and vision for the future. If you start to develop solutions before ensuring a common understanding, you may find that the team’s efforts are scattered, actions may not adequately address the issues, or members may feel like they are making little progress. Ultimately, commitment may wane. The following actions will help your team reach a common understanding of suicide prevention and your community's needs:

• Share experiences and knowledge. For example, you may hold roundtable discussions or ask members to research topics and report back to the group about what they discovered.
• Research facts and statistics about your community’s population, deaths, and health care resources.
• Get training.
• Draft a vision and mission statement. For example, your group’s vision may be “High school students have easy access to adequate suicide prevention information, training and interventions.” Your mission statement may be “to empower high school students, parents, teachers, and other school personnel to prevent suicide by providing them with information, training, support, and services.” There are many resources on the web to help you do develop your mission and conduct planning.
• Develop a logic model. A logic model presents a picture of how your effort or initiative is supposed to work and the results you expect to see. “Basically, a logic model is a systematic and visual way to present and share your understanding of the relationships among the resources you have to operate your program, the activities you plan, and the changes or results you hope to achieve.” ¹

Now you have the information you need to develop an action plan. The steps for developing action plans are:

1. Identify who will participate in planning.
2. Convene a planning session.
3. Set goals that will enable you to achieve your vision. For example, if the teen suicide rate is considered in your vision, you might set a goal to implement ongoing gatekeeper training in all middle and high schools for all school personnel.
4. Identify the activities that need to be done to reach each goal.
5. Determine when the activity will be completed.
6. Identify the resource that will be needed to conduct the activities (e.g., people, money, training sites).
7. Include activities to secure the resources (e.g., conduct fundraising, reserve training facilities).
8. Identify who is responsible for leading the activity and who else might be involved.

Ensure that each person in the coalition has access to the action plan. Review the mission and vision, and discuss the action plan status at each coalition meeting. This review helps to keep the coalition on track, brings new members quickly up to speed, facilitates goal completion, and highlights accomplishments. The action plan is evergreen. Allow changes to be proposed and voted upon.