By BERNADETTE LAURITZEN
Executive Director
Champions of Youth Ambitions

• • • • • • Community invited to register now (email brandi@losalamoscf.org) to participate in suicide prevention training class being held Thursday, Aug. 7.

It’s never too late to get involved with life-changing projects, but this Thursday, one local program might just have you save a life.

The LAUNCH program of the Los Alamos Community Foundation (LACF) will begin a community-wide health initiative with its first foray into what could be a significant impact for mental health resources in the community. LAFC’s Program Manager and Anchorum Fellow Brandi Weiss said she is ready for change.

“I am incredibly excited for our first requested training,” Weiss said. “It shows that there is a need and want for suicide prevention training in our community. I am grateful for the participants and the Jewish Center for reaching out and wanting to be involved.”

Anchorum Health Foundation, right in the heart of Santa Fe, has activated a network of like-minded health leaders across the state to create change for New Mexico. LACF can make that change happen with people in our community prepared to usher it in through community engagement of her people and community partners.

Since the Los Alamos Community Foundation works with many non-profits in town, the idea of a community-wide health initiative, which would become LAUNCH, was born out of a pressing need for more mental health resources and access. 

“There is still a large stigma, especially in Los Alamos, when it comes to mental health,” Weiss explained. “It is important to create a community environment in which people can talk about this topic, not feel ashamed, and know where resources are if they need them.”

Weiss’ prior research, a thesis on the youth of our community over decades, has shown that adolescent risk pertaining to mental health is a social problem in Los Alamos. Weiss, who has spent her entire life in this community and has demonstrated that teens have been reporting to the YRRS that many of them are feeling sad or hopeless in some capacity. 

“This should be a concern for the community,” Weiss said. “While there is no way to perfectly fix something like this, changing the culture in town surrounding mental health could allow for a safer, more collaborative community, where no one feels ashamed to not be okay.” 

One step in that direction was when a community member reached out to Weiss about hosting a training. The woman was at a cocktail party with at least 100 people when a woman passed out from what turned out to be a heart attack. She knew CPR and began performing it. After the paramedics took over, a woman who had been seated on the sofa near the victim told her she’d never felt so helpless in her life, and she was going to sign up for a CPR class posthaste. She sees the upcoming training will have a cadre of people able to respond in a potential suicide situation and not feel similarly helpless.

The Los Alamos Jewish Center views human life as a core value of Judaism, and they are ready to go as the first community group to begin community training. They believe that to save a single life is to save the whole world, according to their Talmud teachings. The Los Alamos Jewish Center is motivated to take advantage of this training and empower its congregants to help save a life.

The first opportunity for attending the program is this Thursday, Aug. 7. The 6.5-hour training will be hosted by the Los Alamos Community Foundation. This is the first of many opportunities. The class will be conducted from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and individuals from the community are welcome.

To register, email Brandi Weiss at brandi@losalamoscf.org.

An additional training will be held the following week for community partners already teaching in Los Alamos.