Umatter -- Prevent Teen Suicide in New England

CHL strives to work in pace with the field and provide resources, training and support. Most of CHL’s partners are seeing significant “exhaustion and fatigue” from their staff. Ironically, this creates more reasons to have prevention protocols embedded into organizations and to provide training which teaches the concepts, knowledge, skills, tools, and resources needed to respond to new demands.

We see many organizations are impacted by changes in staff. When schools and organizations have new leadership and staff they may be hesitant to dig deeper into systems work that addresses health concerns and find they must table or downscale the work in order to keep pace with the already significant demands of their environments. CHL then tries to retool how we go about working with partners and our expectations.

In spite of the significant demands of the past two years we have many education and healthcare partners who continue to do the difficult work of offering training on mental health, substance misuse, and building system structure and protocol to address priority health issues. This is happening because they see that doing this work fulfills their overall mission to educate and assist children, youth, young adults, and the staff and adults around them.

We are frequently told that families have been helped because of training CHL has provided. We all continue to help and move forward at the pace the field can respond to, given available resources.

CHL aims to provide training, support and resources that meet the needs of the field. It is helpful when we hear from you about what is timely and important and how it makes a difference.