“My community wants to save lives but isn’t sure where to start.” “I found a list of suicide prevention best practices, but I’m not sure how to implement them.” “I want to take our coalition to the next level, but don’t know how.” These are common barriers described by local communities seeking to engage in comprehensive suicide prevention. 

The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention’s Transforming Communities: Key Elements for the Implementation of Comprehensive Community-Based Suicide Prevention and CDC’s Preventing Suicide: A Technical Package of Policies, Programs, and Practices (now the Suicide Prevention Resource for Action) were released in 2017 and provided 7 key elements and a list of evidence-informed strategies for community-based suicide prevention. While these resources provided valuable high-level recommendations for prevention, they lacked detailed how-to information to guide communities in achieving their described elements and strategies.

The Community-Led Suicide Prevention (CLSP) Toolkit provides key guidance for addressing these identified barriers and gaps. The freely available toolkit provides step-by-step information and a curated list of resources that can empower any community to implement and sustain equitable and comprehensive suicide prevention. CLSP was created in 2022 by the Education Development Center (EDC), with support from a 12-person advisory group representing national, state, and local partners. These partners came together with EDC to lay out evidence and experience-informed steps communities can take to achieve the seven key elements of community-based suicide prevention. The toolkit was developed with the goal of guiding community coalitions in setting themselves up for long-term sustainability while selecting, implementing, and evaluating evidence-informed suicide prevention strategies.

This presentation will review CLSP’s seven key elements of suicide prevention; review its development and place within national suicide prevention best-practice frameworks; and give listeners an overview of the toolkit contents.  At the end of the presentation, participants will be asked to identify one action they can take to strengthen their community-level efforts to achieve the seven key elements of suicide prevention.