Planning

David Litts, O.D. is Associate Director of the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). As part of the center's executive management team, he contributes to the strategic planning of the Center and oversees the development of training initiatives and the dissemination of evidence-based practices. He also works closely with the National Council for Suicide Prevention and other partner organizations to advance the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention (NSSP). Most recently, he served for three years as Special Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Health and the U.S. Surgeon General wherein he worked to ensure completion of the NSSP and the development of a public-private infrastructure to facilitate its implementation. He has also served as Chief of Staff for the Air Force Surgeon General and Executive Director of the Air Force Suicide Prevention Program. In this post he oversaw the development and implementation of a comprehensive population-based suicide prevention program covering 600,000 Air Force personnel. This program is now the largest and longest sustained suicide prevention effort associated with significant reductions in suicide.

Deborah Haber directs the Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence. She has extensive experience in managing national technical assistance centers, designing training programs for practitioners to implement evidence-based programs, and developing creative training seminars and materials on issues of health, mental health, and violence prevention for youth. Ms. Haber brings 10 years of experience leading a major national training and technical assistance center, The National Training Partnership (NTP), for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As NTP director, she designed and delivered technical assistance (TA) services to every state department of education in the country and 18 of the largest urban districts. Services aimed to strengthen the capacity of school and community-based agencies to implement CDC's "Programs that Work", one of the first initiatives to translate research into practice. As director of curriculum development and training and TA for the Reach for Health project, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Ms. Haber worked with multiple stakeholders to adapt and implement a research-based health risk behavior curriculum to meet the needs of 3,600 students in three Brooklyn middle schools. Ms. Haber has provided training and TA to local school communities, state agencies, and national organizations. Ms. Haber worked with Dr. Ron Slaby to train school, community, and law enforcement practitioners to adapt Aggressors, Victims, and Bystanders, EDC's nationally recognized violence prevention curriculum, for use in their communities. Ms. Haber holds a masters of education in health from Boston University.

Alan Holmlund has been the director of the MA Department of Public Health Suicide Prevention Program for the past 3 and-one-half years. Formerly, he was Executive Director of a Samaritans agency in Framingham, MA, which operated a 24-hour suicide hotline staffed totally by volunteers and conducted suicide prevention training for the community. Alan has a Master of Social Work degree from Boston College and was President and CEO of a multi-service human service agency in southeastern Massachusetts for nine years.