Developing suicide prevention expertise with Aboriginal communities

Abstract

This in-progress project aims to implement and disseminate successful Indigenous suicide prevention activities developed by one Indigenous community to another Indigenous community. It will extract critical elements of this community-driven process, expand these activities, and enable horizontal knowledge transfer of risk-reducing and resilience-enhancing strategies and activities through partner organisations. The process will utilise understandings of how knowledge is communicated across Indigenous families, communities and institutions (meetings, workshops, training, networking), as well as innovative information technology and multi-media approaches. Importantly it will not be simply about taking strategies that have worked in one community and applying them in another. Critical to the success of the project is the principle that all communities are different and that what works for one won’t necessarily work for another. Rather the idea is to take the learnings of one community and make them available to another community which will develop its own approaches taking what works for it from the experiences of the other.