Field-Building in Action: Cohort Shares with Fund for a Safer Future
The Missouri FSP Cohort is building the field of community-based firearm suicide prevention (FSP) in more ways than one. Beyond testing and improving local initiatives, the Cohort is also sharing what they’re learning with leaders in the firearm injury and death space, helping shape future programs and policies based on the insights gleaned from their experiences.
This past April, Missouri Foundation for Health, the Cohort’s initiator and convener, hosted Fund for a Safer Future, a national philanthropic collaborative dedicated to reducing firearm injury and death through pooled funding and expertise, in St. Louis for their quarterly meeting. During the two-day event, several Cohort members—including Amanda Foster (Community Partnership of the Ozarks), Doug Wallace (Behavioral Health Response), John Cornelius (FCC Behavioral Health), Jolie Foreman (Shelby County Cares), and Katie Ellison (Missouri Institute of Mental Health)—sat on panels to share about their FSP efforts, the impacts they’re beginning to see, and key lessons learned with funders from across the county.
During the panels, Cohort members surfaced several important insights about what it takes to advance community-based FSP:
Building community awareness and readiness to support mental health is a prerequisite to FSP – In many communities, mental health remains a taboo topic, making it almost unthinkable to broach the even more sensitive issues of firearms and suicide. Creating space for conversations about mental health helps increase communities’ openness to dialogue—and action—on firearm suicide.
Credibility is contextual – In FSP, the messenger often matters more than the message. Credibility comes from authentically leaning into lived experience with mental health or suicide, personal identity, and community ties, not just familiarity with firearms. While understanding and leveraging one’s own credibility is vital, it’s equally important to recognize when other trusted voices may resonate more with a given audience.
Communities, and the stakeholder groups within them, are far from monolithic – While they may appear similar on the surface, no two communities are the same. The lessons learned by the Cohort are a good starting point for others looking to engage in community-based FSP, but anyone seeking to launch their own FSP efforts will need to tailor their approach to their community’s specific needs and context. The same holds true for stakeholder groups like faith leaders—what resonates with one may not connect with another. Those leading community-based FSP efforts must be agile and rapidly adapt their messaging and strategies to fit each unique audience.
Impacts may take years to become visible, so it’s important to recognize the small signals of change – Community-based work moves at the speed of relationships, which take time to build and nurture. Now in our third year of implementation (and fifth year overall), the Cohort is seeing meaningful progress, like faith leaders seeking suicide prevention training and students leading mental health conversations in schools. However, early on, success showed up in much smaller ways, like a key stakeholder warming up to conversations on firearm suicide or a community member reaching out to the Cohort about someone in crisis. While seemingly small, these “wins” reassured us our work was headed in the right direction even before larger impacts became visible.
By sharing their hard-earned insights with the Fund for a Safer Future, the Missouri FSP Cohort hopes to elevate FSP as a key pillar in reducing firearm injury and death and to help pave the way for other community-driven FSP efforts nationwide.