Latest News and Events

Rapid City Community Selected as Project Site for South Dakota’s Community Partnership for Suicide Prevention Project

The Rapid City area community was selected by the South Dakota Division of Mental Health to partner together to bring suicide prevention training and activities to the community. The State of South Dakota received a Federal grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to target suicide prevention activities to youth ages 14-24. The focus of the project is to bring trainings to the communities that are selected to partner with the Division of Mental Health. With the target focus of this project on youth ages 14-24, schools are asked and encouraged to participate in the project with trainings tailored to the individual school’s needs.

In order to ensure that with these trainings comes the ability of the community’s service providers to handle the referrals that schools will make to youth with suicidal ideation or at-risk of suicide, a special community suicide prevention taskforce will be formed to work to develop and improve upon the protocols needed to meet the emergency needs of youth at-risk of attempting and/or completing suicide. Various community mental health agencies, local law enforcement personnel, first responders, as well as additional community organizations will be involved in the suicide prevention taskforce’s efforts. The taskforce will receive technical assistance from the South Dakota Division of Mental Health to identify community needs, including bringing the specific types of suicide prevention trainings that the Rapid City community needs. It will also work with the community’s mental health providers and first responders to develop and improve upon the referral network’s protocols in order to ensure the needs of those identified at-risk of suicide receive immediate mental health care.

A number of suicide prevention trainings will be available to the Rapid City community at no cost to participants, including schools, mental health and healthcare providers, suicide survivors support group facilitators, first responders, and the general public. Anyone can take this opportunity to learn more about suicide, including the warnings signs of suicide and how they can help someone at-risk of suicide.

While this project is a collaborative effort consisting of a number of community providers who will serve on the community suicide prevention taskforce, the Front Porch Coalition will lead the taskforce. If you would like more information about the project or the taskforce’s work or would like to participate in the taskforce, contact Stephanie Schweitzer Dixon at the Front Porch Coalition who will be leading the taskforce at: 605-348-6692 or by email at: inquiries@frontporchcoalition.org.

Information regarding community trainings and the taskforce’s progress will be updated regularly on the organization’s website at: www.frontporchcoalition.org.

Front Porch Coalition Continues to Provide Youth Suicide Prevention Training to Rapid City Schools

The Front Porch Coalition will continue its efforts to prevent youth suicides by again offering the school-based youth suicide prevention training to the schools in Rapid City who were unable to participate in October 2008.  With this training, all middle and high schools will receive this unique school-based youth suicide prevention training. The schools that were able to participate in October 2008 have already seen the improvements in their students’ help-seeking behaviors.  Peers who were trained to become peer leaders have brought youth who needed help to the adults who were trained to be adult advisors for this program. 

If you are interested in becoming a community advisor for one of the Rapid City schools, please call the Front Porch Coalition at 605-348-6692 for additional information and to register for the trainings.  Community advisors can assist the adult advisors from schools in helping peers bring healthy messages to the youth in their schools, developing and coordinating public service announcements, and creating bulletin boards with those messages that the trained peer advisors will be trained to bring to the youth in their schools.

The organization is working to continue to secure the funding needed to bring this training to additional schools in the Black Hills region.  Please contact the Front Porch Coalition if you are interested in bringing this training to your school.  Please periodically check back for additional information about these and future trainings and any additional community awareness events, as the final details of these trainings are developed, including the times and locations of each of the trainings.

Mental Health Community Working to Provide Family Advocacy Program

In 2008 the John T. Vucurevich Foundation brought together the service providers in the Rapid City community to address the results of the Black Hills Community Needs Assessment, released in January 2007, which indicated mental health, substance abuse and suicide as major issues/needs in Butte, Lawrence, Meade and Pennington Counties. As a result of our high rate of suicide, especially among teens, the State of South Dakota has twice been selected for a Federal three-year Garrett Lee Smith Suicide Prevention Grant. One of the key problems is the fragmentation of the service delivery system. This fragmentation is not limited to South Dakota. In 2002 President Bush assembled a Commission on Mental Health called the New Freedom Commission. In their 2003 report, Achieving the Promise: Transforming Mental Healthcare in America, the Commission states, “for too many Americans with mental illnesses, the mental health services and supports they need remain fragmented, disconnected and often inadequate, frustrating the opportunity for recovery. Today’s mental health care system is a patchwork relic—the result of disjointed reforms and policies. Instead of ready access to quality care, the system presents barriers that all too often add to the burden of mental illnesses for individuals, their families, and our communities.”

To address this problem, a taskforce was formed entitled the Black Hills Mental Health/Substance Abuse Systems Change Collaborative. Its mission is to build a sustainable model in which a broad and diverse range of stakeholders, including funders, take ownership of problems and work collaboratively to influence change. Four primary subcommittees were formed to focus on four areas of highest need: prevention, family advocacy, service integration and systems change, and service infrastructure. While three of those four committees has worked to develop plans to implement change in the mental health care system in the community, one committee, the family advocacy committee has just begun its work. Family members of people who struggle with a mental illness or substance abuse disorder can provide the greatest insight into what those struggles are while helping to find ways to change the system. Sometime someone struggling with a mental health condition just needs help getting the types of services that they need, someone to advocate for their healthcare. This philosophy is fairly new to South Dakota but being implemented in other states and communities across the country. If you would like to help in the work of the Family Advocacy Committee to try to help bring a Family Advocacy Program to the community, please contact Alys Ratigan at: 605-348-1696 or 605-431-2434 or Stephanie Schweitzer Dixon at the Front Porch Coalition at 605-348-6692 for more information.

Free Support Group on Recovering from Suicide Grief

Thank you to the generous donations from some local businesses, the Front Porch Coalition is now able to offer free of charge to the people and suicide survivors in the Black Hills region the option to attend a support group facilitated by a professional clinician. This support group is unique in that it will bring more than just support to those who have lost someone to suicide. It will also provide people with an opportunity to learn how to cope with their grief and learn that what they are going through and may be dealing with is normal after loosing someone close to them to suicide.

The focus of the group is to understand suicide grief, learn the normal stages of grief specific to suicide, work through the grief process, and learn how to cope, heal, and recover from a loss to suicide. The support group will be facilitated by a licensed professional who will take participants through the grief process specific to suicide and provide education and resources on dealing will grief, loss, and healing. The emphasis of the support group is on education as opposed to counseling. Interested participants will be given referrals to other counseling and support resources in the community should they need any additional resources and assistance.

Pre-registration for the group session is required. Participation in the support group is voluntary but attendance at every meeting is encouraged since the support group will be closed to those who pre-register and will run for six consecutive weeks per session. The group will meet at Lutheran Social Services at 2920 Sheridan Lake Road in Rapid City from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 pm. The next group session is scheduled to start on Thursday, May 22, 2008. Please call the Front Porch Coalition at 348-6692 to register each person attending. Additional group sessions will be held throughout the year, as the program will be an ongoing service.

The support group is free of charge to those wishing to participate. Materials will be provided to each participant. Pre-registration is required since the group will be a closed group from beginning to end, so please contact the Front Porch Coalition at 605-348-6692, by email at: inquiries@frontporchcoalition.org, or by mail at: 915 Mountain View Road, Rapid City, SD 57702. Please RSVP containing your name, mailing address, email address, and phone number as contact information in the event any information needs to be sent to the participants, as well as the number of participants planning to attend with you.

Suicide Prevention Program: “Suicide Prevention Is Everybody’s Business”

Over the past few years, the local suicide rate has been steadily rising. In Pennington County, the number of suicide completions over the past five years has nearly doubled from one per month to nearly two per month. During the past three years, twelve of the suicide victims have been between the ages of 11 and 19 and six between the ages of 20 and 26. More than fifty percent of the suicide deaths in Pennington County over the past nine years have ages that range from 14 - 35 years old at the time of their death. As the local, state, and national rate of suicide completions increases, the need for effective suicide prevention programs in every community becomes essential. Even though mental health providers are trained to identify the immediate warning signs for suicide, everyone needs to know those warning signs. Many suicide victims were not receiving treatment prior to and at the time of their death. It is important that we educate people on how to identify those warning signs and teach them how to ensure that the suicidal person receives appropriate and immediate assistance in order to save their life.

One of the primary goals and most important projects that the Front Porch Coalition is working to develop and bring to community organizations and business in the Black Hills region is a suicide prevention program that everyone can use in their everyday lives. A number of presentations will be developed so that the information will be tailored to the specific community organization, gender group, age group, and other demographic backgrounds. Each presentation is intended to teach everyone how to identify suicide warning signs, determine if a person is at risk for suicide based on those warning signs, and teach that person how to refer and persuade the suicidal person to receive treatment from the appropriate mental health provider in their community. Yet the presentation will be tailored to meet the needs of the specific group targeted, i.e. school teachers and counselors, youth providers, nursing home providers, hospice providers, ministers, etc. The presentations will provide general information on suicide prevention and will be approximately one to two hours in length.

The organization continues to work on developing more in-depth training sessions for those groups who may need more detailed information and resources on various techniques on suicide prevention. The first of those training sessions is being implemented in the Rapid City Schools and is specifically address towards youth suicide prevention training in schools. Contact the Front Porch Coalition office or check the organization’s website for the latest news and updates for more information on this program.

Join in Public Awareness Anti-Stigma Campaign

The Front Porch Coalition has made it a strategic priority to implement a public awareness and anti-stigma campaign to reduce the negative stigma that still remains that prevents people from seeking professional help for mental health, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and support after loosing someone to suicide, with the goal of preventing suicide and improving the overall mental health and wellness of the community. Nationwide, approximately 90% of all suicide victims suffer from some form of mental health or substance abuse problem. Two-thirds of those did not receive any treatment at the time of their death. Of the average twenty suicides per year in Pennington County, nearly all of those victims were not receiving any mental health or substance abuse treatment in the days, weeks, or months preceding their death. Nearly all of those victims were using alcohol at the time of their death and/or were dealing with some form of mental illness or using and/or abusing alcohol or drugs. While every situation and suicide death has different circumstances, these alarming statistics have remained fairly stable over the years.

So in order to prevent suicide deaths from occurring and reducing the number of suicide attempts that our community has endured over the past few months and even years, it is our priority to implement this anti-stigma and public awareness campaign. In order to do this and implement a full-scale campaign meeting the needs and concerns of the entire community and all of its mental health and substance abuse providers, we are asking for the assistance of those providers in preparing to implement this campaign as well as bringing it to the Black Hills communities. We will also need assistance in raising the funding in order to carry out this campaign. While we will be pursuing various sources of funding, we will need the assistance of a number of community providers, organizations, and even local businesses in order to raise enough funding to implement this project. Please contact me if you are interested in and able to assist us, regardless of how you can be of assistance. Together we can work to raise awareness and reduce the incidence of suicide and get people the help that they need in order to improve and maintain their mental health and wellness.

This page is updated periodically with the latest news and events from within the organization, including the events we are hosting within the community. Check back in the future for the most recent news and upcoming events. (Updated) 04/19/2010