Sharing Our Wisdom

Sharing Our Wisdom brings together community stories and experiences, shared through various forms of photography, artwork, music, prayers, songs, and dance, which illustrate and honor traditional views of the world and ways to live in harmony. The use of storytelling allows the viewer to gain a deeper understanding of how these traditions relate to the current work of creating a happy and healthy future for the next generations by promoting strength and preventing suicide.

Also check out the Transforming Tribal Communities series of six-to-eight-minute webinar clips, which focus on using community strengths to address the root causes of mental health issues and suicide in indigenous communities.

Integrating Suicide and Substance Abuse Prevention in Rural Alaska

Take a journey with Melanee as she shares her region with local photography and gives you a glimpse of the lessons Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation learned while working in harmony with 14 remote communities in understanding the readiness of those communities to address suicide.  To learn more about integrating suicide prevention and substance abuse visit the SPRC Substance Abuse and Suicide Prevention Collaboration Continuum.

Walking Softly to Heal: The Importance of Community Readiness

Communities, just like their members, will differ in their ability to deal with all the issues surrounding suicide and its prevention. The challenge in successful suicide prevention planning is to understand a community’s readiness to take action and design culturally contextual, comprehensive approaches that honor their belief and value system.These resources will help you understand and measure how ready a community is to address a particular issue like suicide, and how to use that knowledge to stimulate change.

The Community Readiness Model (CRM) was developed at Colorado State University (CSU). The National Center for Community Readiness at CSU was formed to assist communities and tribes in using the model. The CRM identifies dimensions, such as leadership involvement, knowledge of the problem, levels of community readiness and can be easily scored by the community.

To find out more please review the Resources and Next Steps