About

Innovative Suicide Prevention, Intervention and Education in Postsecondary Ed is a public initiative that offers free, optional resources to promote behavioral health and suicide prevention at postsecondary institutions in Washington state.

Forefront Suicide Prevention, a Center of Excellence at the University of Washington, is the lead agency for INSPIRE.

INSPIRE Workgroup

Members of the INSPIRE Workgroup, along with occasional sub-groups, bring expertise, passion, and tenacity to the work. Time and again, colleagues from around the state have said, “yes, I’m busy. But this work is so important that I am happy to help.”

Additionally, individual institutions have generously shared tools and resources they created to benefit their students with their peer institutions statewide. 

We welcome all users – and invite them to explore this collection of resources. We hope that the resources gathered on this website will be useful to:

  • Administrators
  • Student Affairs leaders
  • Faculty
  • Students
  • Parents and family
  • Counselors and counseling center directors

Mental health counselors are placed at the bottom of this list to help all users understand that all of us have a role to play in saving lives from suicide. We are many years past the era in which the counseling office on campus could shoulder the entire burden of our students’ behavioral health.

LEADERSHIP

Interim Co-Chairs
Julie Garver, Director of Policy & Academic Affairs for the Council of Presidents
Joe Holliday, Director of Student Services for the State Board of Community & Technical Colleges

Staff
Ambyr Travis, Forefront’s Training and Consultation Specialist

In 2016, Washington legislators passed a bill (HB 1138) that created a task force which sought to understand the resources and lack of assets that framed the suicide prevention efforts of the state’s colleges and universities. That work resulted in a legislative report, Mental Health & Suicide Prevention in Higher Education. Recommendations from this report and leadership from Washington State’s Legislature led to the 2018 bill, SB 6514.

 

Three components were included:

  1. Publicly available resources for optional use by all institutions
  2. Data collection on the prevalence of suicidal behavior and related metrics in postsecondary institutions
  3. Grant program to support for suicide prevention work by under-resourced institutions

 

The Washington Achievement Council administered a one-time grant program for under-resourced institutions. The program resulted in eight grants to institutions across the state. Find information here.

The Washington State Department of Health has made suicide prevention a priority in recent years. Find information here. 

 

2017-2021

Forefront Suicide Prevention worked with the Jed Foundation and the Jolene McCaw Family Foundation to create a Washington Jed Cohort of 13 campuses, including public and private, and 2-year and 4-year institutions.

The cohort entered the four-year JED Program in 2017. Through Forefront, annual conferences were held for these institutions. All cohort members underwent the Healthy Minds Study in 2017, to set a baseline for their students’ attitudes and approaches to mental health issues. Their second and final Healthy Minds Study results will be complete by 2021.

A final convening of the Jed Cohort will take place in April 2021.

2015-2019

Through funding from Washington State’s Garrett Lee Smith Grant, Forefront provided annual statewide suicide prevention conferences for higher education over the five-year period.