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Make a Plan

This is your guide to taking action to prevent suicide in your community.

    Welcome

    This planning guide will walk you through developing, implementing, and evaluating a community suicide prevention plan. This guide can be followed step-by-step or it can be used as needed as a reference.

    Sustainability tips

    This icon, which appears throughout the guide, indicates sustainability tips. Planning for sustainability can help guarantee the longevity, efficiency, and effectiveness of your suicide prevention plan.

    Worksheet

    This icon, which also appears throughout the guide, indicates places where you can fill in your worksheet. Download your worksheet and find out more below!

    Planning steps

    Come Together

    If you don’t currently have a plan, this is a great place to start. In this step, you’ll dig into the specifics of your current situation to:

    • Identify, engage with, and bring together people from your target population
    • Bring people together to form a working committee responsible for the plan and address self-care
    • Build a community profile including an overview of the current situation as well as current strengths (assets), gaps, and opportunities?

    Create a Plan

    This is where you’ll start making sense of all the information you collected in the previous step to:

    • Identify plan activities
    • Choose how to measure the success of your activities (this forms the basis of Step 5: Evaluation)

    Act on the Plan

    You’re ready to start implementing your plan! In this step you’ll consider how to:

    • Begin implementation by considering what will work best for all involved
    • Keep motivation levels high as the plan is implemented

    Evaluate the Plan

    Finally, you’ll take stock of your work:

    • What worked and why?
    • What will you modify for the next round?

    Helpful definitions

    Defining community: Community, within this plan, is defined as the environment in which you’re developing a suicide prevention plan. For example, if you work with older adults in an older-adults-focused community centre, your community would be the community centre and everyone who is involved with it.

    Defining target population: Your target population is the people who you hope will be impacted by the suicide prevention plan, for example, older adults themselves. They are the focus of your plan.

    Defining working committee: These are the people you would work with to create the suicide prevention plan.

    Worksheet

    This worksheet is a tool for you to create and summarize your plan.

    Fill in worksheet sections according to the prompts, indicated by this icon, that appear throughout the guide.

    Don’t forget to download the worksheet PDF and save it on your computer. Make any updates to the saved PDF and remember to save your changes. Hint: If the PDF is opening in your browser, you won’t be able to save the changes you make to it. If the PDF opens in Adobe Reader or another PDF reader software, then it’s possible to save your changes.

    Download