 and welcome to the back story. I'm Tim Waters, host of the back story, and we are coming to you tonight live from beautiful downtown Longmont in the Longmont Public Media Studios. I'm joined this evening by guests from Rising and Suicide. That's the swear we're going to tell tonight, and I'm going to introduce those guests in just a moment. We have a live studio audience, so for Longmonters who have nothing to do on a Monday evening, and you're looking for a way to kind of tune in to really important conversations, this is the place you should be tonight, and the place you might want to be a month from tonight. The last Monday of the month is when we come live from these studios. So we have a studio audience, the studio audience knows that we get about 40 minutes into the hour. If they have questions that are inspired by this conversation, they'll get a chance to ask them. If they don't, no pressure studio audience, just enjoy the conversation. We're sharing the story tonight of Rise Against Suicide, Boulder County non-profit organization that's been around for, how long? Since 2009. Since 2009. And I'm joined by Jenna Clencher. Yes. Is that the right pronunciation? Yes. Okay, that's great. I asked Jenna, just what's the right pronunciation and I just messed it up. And Andy Jason, Glenn is the executive director. Jenna is the executive director. Andy is a board member. So welcome to you both, and just right off the top, I wanna say first, thank you for donating another hour of your time. I know you donate lots of hours during the course of a month. So thanks for your time tonight, for carving out part of your Monday night. More importantly, thanks for what you do every day. We're very grateful to be here. Thank you. Listen, I'm very grateful that you're here. And really grateful for the work you do in this community, as we tell the story, folks who hear it. And I'm certain that people who work with you know why this is such an important story. But the work these two are doing and the people who are with them, board members and staff members and volunteers, are doing life changing and life saving work in this community. And in Boulder, in fact, all throughout Boulder County. But those, that's the story we wanna share. And it's time to get into it. So let's start by learning a little bit about the two of you. Jenna, start with, tell us who you are, as much as you want the public to know. And kind of what drew you to this work. Okay, so first I wanna say thank you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for inviting our organization here to share our story and let other people know what we do in hopes that we can help more kids. So I am the executive director, as you said, for Rise Against Suicide. I started with Rise in 2019. My background is business. So I didn't have a non-profit background when I started. And this came to me because I was volunteering with another group. And that person, the person within that group sat on the board of Rise Against Suicide and said, our executive director's leaving and I think you'd be perfect. Will you come interview for this position? And I was fortunate enough to interview for this position and get the position. And I will tell you a little bit about my story and how it fits so well for me. I have the permission of my daughter to share this. My oldest daughter, when she was in high school, she came to me and she begged me to let her die and said, you need to let me die. She said, I can't do this anymore. She's like, it's too painful and I can't go unless you give me permission. And I said, I can't do that, honey. I said, I love you too much and we'll get you through this. And it was one of the most painful times in my life. And my gift is that we were able to get her through it and we were able to find her help. But I remember being in that moment thinking, feeling like the whole ground had fallen out from under me and where do we go and what do we do for help, right? And so this job came into my life and I thought, this is meant to be. Like I have to help others and give back the way others helped me when my child was struggling with her suicidal ideation. And so that's my story, that's why I'm here. It's a gift to show up every day. It's really challenging work and hard and difficult and scary sometimes, but it's also a gift to know that what we're doing can help these kids and help them not go to that place of taking their lives. So most people who know me know that I'm a pretty emotional guy. I hope we can get through this. I know, I know. Tonight without all this candy. Yes, so it happens to me too, I will cry with you. You can ask Andy, I cry all the time. Yes. Andy, tell us about you. I'm a board member on RISE. I came right on to the RISE board right about when Jenna did. And so 2019, I'm a former school teacher, mostly with a little one, kindergarten and preschool. I work with teenagers most of the time with another nonprofit where I'm the program director. And I've lived in Boulder for about 25 years now, originally from the East Coast. And I came to this work with RISE in the worst way you can come, which is that I lost my son to suicide when he was 16. My son's name is Jesse. And this is a picture of the two of us. Can we get that? Yeah, Jennifer, thanks. And Jesse was a beautiful person. He was happy and sad, exuberant, full of life. Like, this is not the kid you would think would die by suicide, but he felt things very deeply. When people ask me for a word that would describe Jesse, even from when he was very little, my word would be more. He's more, he feels more, he is more, he lives more. Every day, he really lived in the moment. You could have a fight and in 10 minutes for him, it's over. And you gotta give me a kiss before I leave for school, and I'm still holding on to that. I just tried for three hours to get you out of it. But he was a beautiful person and he felt things really deeply. And I think the world can be a really hard place for people who feel things really deeply. We're just not set up for that. And as a parent, when you know that, you try to be the skin for your child, kind of to protect them. But as they get older, that's really hard to do because they're needing to move out into the world more. I was shocked when Jesse died by suicide. I remember sitting at his memorial service and looking out at the sea of people. There were about 500 people there and I would say about half of them were young people and I was scared. I was scared that some other young person was gonna sit there and see all these people and think, well, if I died, maybe 500 people would come. And I wanted to address that head on right then and there. And I did talk to the kids who were sitting there that day and I asked them to promise that if they ever felt like they couldn't remember what was good about themselves, that they would ask for help. And I told them if they didn't have anyone that they could think of to ask that they could come to me. And then I got scared. And I thought, what if they come? What am I gonna do? So my husband and I went and did some training so that we could understand how to have these conversations and what to do because we knew that we couldn't fix it but we could be a link to getting help for somebody else. And that's how I entered this world of suicide prevention. And it's been a gift to me. It's given purpose to my life. Jesse was my only child. And when people would ask me, do you have any children after Jesse was gone? I never knew what to say. Even when I knew the question was coming, I would, I never knew what to say and but I do have a child. He's just not living here on this earth right now. This part of this conversation is I think we wanna make sure we accomplish in this story like we haven't talked as much about rise, which we will. But it's how do you talk about it? How do you get into these conversations that are meaningful, that are instructive that people can both learn about what's going on maybe in their own families but also how to relate to your friends and neighbors either who have gone through this experience or who are afraid that they might, right? So if we could come out of this smarter tonight about how we have conversations and what have been worth the time, I'm hoping that maybe one person watches this show who benefits directly. So let's get after it. I'm embarrassed that I've been 30 years in Boulder County active in a lot of different things and then just only recently did I even learn about rising and suicide, where have I been? How is it that I'm so ignorant about an organization that's been around since 2009 and doing such important work? So it just gives a little bit of history and kind of context and background and then we'll get into more specifics about the work. So in 2009, I would say between 2009 and 2016, really youth suicide was, the number was fairly low and so we were serving probably about 50 kiddos at that time and per year. 50 kids. 50, which is still a lot. However, yeah, we're gonna get to the numbers of where we're at now, unfortunately. We also were, we were started as an affiliate of a bigger organization in 2009. So really it was just a smaller organization. In 2011, we got our own nonprofit, became our own nonprofit and had our own EIN number. That is what nonprofits have. An employer identification. Yes, that's right. And so we got our own and then in 20, when I started in 2019, we renamed ourselves in 2020. Part of the reason we renamed ourselves in 2020 is because many people said to me, what does your name mean? And we had to have a discussion about that and part of that discussion was, do we wanna say suicide in our name or are we gonna upset people? And at the same time, our organization is here to break that stigma. So we knew we needed to name it so we could talk about it. And so we named it to talk about it. So we did rename ourselves, how we came up and our mission by the way, our mission is breaking financial and social barriers to mental health. So financial barriers, obviously, a lot of people can't afford mental health care right now even if they have insurance, the deductible's so high. The social barriers, many of the kids don't have a way to get to a therapist's office. We remove that, we send our therapist to meet the kiddo where they're at. A lot of our therapists can't afford an office. So we offer our therapist an office to see those kids. There's a lot of barriers that stand in the way for many people. Those are the provider side and on that crazy. Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. And I think when we look at mental health and we look at suicide, we have to start looking at the bigger picture and everybody that plays a role within getting that young person the help they need. And so I think, I mean, that's what Rise Against Suicide does. That is our mission. And we came about because there were four suicides in a month in 2009. And somebody had a clothing drive where people got together and had a clothing drive and said, what are we gonna do with the money? And their decision was, we're gonna pay for therapy. We're gonna get these kids the help they need and meet them where they're at. So you've got a team. You're the executive director. So just talk about the organization and the kind of resources that are available. And Andy, from a board perspective, what are board members bring to this to support that work? So we do have a team now. But we didn't have a team when I started and I have to say kudos to the best board I could ever ask for. Because when I started in 2019, it was me part-time and our board working full-time. And we all worked together to get it where it's at today. We now have a program director. And that program director, so runs our program. They recruit our therapists for us. They work with both school districts. They work with all our community partners. They work with you both in the same brain and the Board of Valley Schools. Yes, we're in both districts, yeah. And we have a development director and that person goes out and fundraises for us. They find funding so we can keep our program going. And then we have one other position that I'm looking to fill now and it's a communication specialist. And then we'll be full. I mean, I think we'll be full, right? Like we've never had a full team. So I think we're still learning like what is all of this look like and what are all the needs. But for this year we'll be full and that's a gift. And you, do you acquire your program from therapy or is therapy just part of the program? Therapy is part of the program. So our program is, I'm gonna use an example. A therapist here at Longmont High School identifies that a kid, a counselor, sorry, a school counselor at Longmont High School identifies a youth is struggling with suicidal ideation. You know, I'm gonna go back to barriers for a minute. Our previous board president recognized that a barrier was communication. Communication between the person who refers to rising and suicide, trying to pick up the phone and call somebody to make a referral. It could take days. He had a system created for us and it allows the school counselor when they identify that young person to enter that person's information into this system. So that school counselor will then call one of our therapists, our contracted therapist and to find out if they can see that kiddo. If they can, they enter that therapist into the system. Therapist gets an email and starts seeing the kiddo immediately. So it's all within this system and it breaks that communication barrier where everybody's playing phone take, everybody's trying to email back and forth. So then that therapist gets the referral, they pick up the phone, they call the kiddo, they call the parent. That child can be seen within 24 to 72 hours. That's unheard of. And that's not a wait list. They don't meet the therapist for the first time and the therapist says, well now you're gonna have to wait three to six months. No, it's immediate help. And then rise against suicide pays that therapist. The therapist builds us through the system and we pay them weekly. We don't accept insurance. So that's why we fundraise. That's what our board helps us do and what our development character does. When that referral's made, the counselor, and this could be somebody else, could it be a parent? Yes. It could be anybody who has this conversation and is concerned about what they've heard and what a child is thinking about. Yes, but if you called me and you were concerned about a child, what we would do first is we have someone, we have a therapist in house and we would do a suicide risk assessment. So that's super important because we would wanna make sure that that young person doesn't need more services beyond what rise against suicide has to offer. If they're a 911 and we have to get them to the hospital, we would wanna make sure we do that. So we need to be responsible in that as well and make sure that they're getting their needs met after that first phone call. So if somebody needs something that's an emergency, or it's critical, then there's one response. But there's an assessment that occurs in where to kind of pick up with a child. And school counselors can do that assessment. So that's why they are a point of entry. But a parent, you're so emotionally involved with a parent, you can't do a clear assessment. So we have somebody who will say, don't worry, you don't have to go out and find this person yourself. That's right. We have someone who can do this assessment and then we will see if they're appropriate for our services or we'll make suggestions for where else they would need them. Is I'm sitting here thinking the level of activity that occurs, especially in the non-school months, right? Which is fewer and fewer these days. But I think about the city staff that works with kids across the city in all kinds of activities, but way more intensely in the summertime. But it's year-round where they're made very well. They have relationships with families and with kids where they might hear something that would be a concern to them. Is there any, how would city staff, division of youth, children, youth and families, how would they connect? So we're partners with the Youth Longmont Center and the CORE program here in Longmont. So I'll start with CORE and the reason we partnered with CORE. So CORE is a program here in Longmont that when the police get a phone call, a mental health phone call, they have mental health professionals that go out on that call. If they go out and they identify that this kiddo's struggling with suicidal ideation, but doesn't necessarily need to go to the hospital, because when those calls are made, sometimes it can be traumatic enough when the police show up, right? And it can be scary. What the CORE program and RISE try to avoid is if we don't have to send that kiddo to the hospital, which can be traumatic again, another traumatic experience, and we can get that child regulated, let's say it's over the weekend, if that kiddo knows that they can be seen on Monday, they can usually hold on because it's hopeful for them. It's hopeful that they're gonna get the help they need. And so CORE refers to us if they have a kiddo. They get into the system, they make the online referral and that kiddo can start being seen. If they need to be seen at their school, we communicate with CORE in that way. The Longmont Youth Center refers to us as well. We now have eight bilingual therapists, six of them speak Spanish and English and the other two speak Romanian English. So we are developing and creating partnerships outside of the schools for that exact reason. For whatever it's worth, viewers of the Backstory might recall, and if they don't, there is in the inventory of Backstory, we feature the policing in Longmont in a series. Oh, good. We spent some time with the co-responder staff. Oh, great. What does that mean and what's different here than you might find in other municipalities in terms of how we police and how we deal with issues that shouldn't be treated as crimes. That's right. But as genuine concerns to which there needs to be a response, but not going to jail. That's right. So viewers might wanna go back and watch that one. Yes, it's a phenomenal program. It really is, yes. So Jenna's very modest because when I first came on the board, she was at part-time, half-time, working way more hours than half-time, but we didn't have any other staff. So the board was fulfilling that role of trying to do the fundraising, the governance and everything that was included, trying to figure out new systems and programs and all of that. Because of Jenna, she's been able to raise our profile in the community both with our school districts. So we have more and more referrals coming in, which we see as a good thing. It's a bad thing on the one hand, but it's a good thing. You wish you weren't getting any. That's right. For the right reasons. It would be great if we were out of business because there weren't suicide children at risk for suicide. But given that there are, we're so glad they're finding us, right? And so she's raised our profile with the school districts and built these other partnerships with the core, with the YMCA, with other, with the Longmont Youth Center and she built our fundraising up to the point where we were able to hire people because we're seeing so many more youth be needed to have more staff or we were not going to be able to keep going. We were always worried that the day would come when we'd have a youth contact. We would be contacted about a youth and not have the money to pay for the therapy. We are so fortunate to never have reached that situation. We were probably about three months away from it when the two of us came into the organization. And now we are in good shape, but we're consistently needing to bring in more money because we are bringing in more youth and being able to offer them more sessions if they need it. I wanna, we're gonna touch on numbers, right? What's happened since 2009 and from 50 to what you're dealing with today. And we're gonna talk more about fundraising. Funding, where does money come from? And what are the types of funding that you could benefit from? So we'll talk about specifically what we can do right here. In addition to grant funds and the kinds that you pursue. But I wanna spend just another moment in terms of programming. Is there, is education part of this? Is there an education dimension? So we stay, we don't mission creep a lot simply because of the nature of what we do. So we really focus on our program, Tim, is what I'm trying to say. We're really one dimensional. Here's why. The therapy is the problem. Yes, here's why. That's what I was trying to do. Yes, therapy is the program. Like that's it. Because we understand as soon as we start venturing out, we lose focus. And these kids are too important. So talk about, so talk about programming. So you're there when ideation is expressed. Is there, who's working on prevention? Is there a prevention dimension to all this? Yeah, there is. Mental health partners has many, many trainings that people can take. I really recommend people, like people find mental health partners and these trainings, if you wanna learn more about suicide prevention. I think it's so important. I think we can help people as a community. If we're, you never know when we're gonna be standing and talking with someone and they open up to us and we have those tools to use to speak to them. Parents, rise will go out and speak with parents. But it's less educational. It's more getting them to know that we exist and that they can call us when they need help. So letting them know they're not alone. Jenna spoke at an impact on education forum for parents and has spoken in many, many other forums where parents are called together, specifically about mental health. Just we're part of the spectrum of mental health. We really focus on kids who are struggling with suicidal thoughts. And there's other aspects to mental health that we don't necessarily address, although some of them are coexisting problems. But Jenna speaks all over the place. All groups that will hear us. And in Boulder, I work with a group of young people who do that same thing, their mission. I work with a group called Coley's Closet. They're only in Boulder Valley School District. Love to have it started up here. And these are students that we train and they go into, they have, we're an approved peer education organization in the school district, which means that teachers can request us as guest speakers. And our high school teenagers are trained to go in and do a presentation about suicide prevention for youth. About what the warning signs and risk factors are and what do you do if you see those in yourself or in one of your friends. Or a family member. And that's part of a prevention. So an upstream prevention. What RISE does is preventing actual suicide in the moment. But upstream prevention is education. And even upstream from that is learning to talk about our feelings. So parents, you don't all of a sudden start talking about this when your kid is in trouble and a teenager. Hopefully you have built a foundation of talking about mental health and normalizing talking about your feelings as kids are growing up. So when you're having a bad day saying to your kids, mommy's so sorry, she's so grumpy today. I've just had a really hard day and sometimes I'm really grumpy. And I know that's not fair to you and I'm gonna try not to be so grumpy, but that's what's happening for me right now. It gives kids permission to then say that themselves. So you wanna normalize these conversations. You wanna normalize, hey, how was your day today? Or tell me something new that happened to you today. Just normalize conversation so that when the kids are in trouble, they know that this is something that you're willing to go there with them. And it's scary sometimes. Parents are scared to have these conversations. The truth is we talk to our kids about hard things all the time. We talk about stranger danger. We talk about wearing bike helmet and pads when you're out biking. And we don't have to scare kids to say, we talk about our feelings because that's part of our health. How are you feeling today? How's your body feeling? How's your mind feeling? That's a normal part of conversation. And so we want people to know that it doesn't have to be scary. We do understand that it can be scary because you feel like if your kid comes and tells you that they're really struggling, you feel scared that you don't know what to do. And what you can say is that sounds really scary. That sounds really hard. And you're not in this by yourself. We're in this together and we're gonna figure out what to do together. And that in itself is a huge relief. Kids don't want to tell their parents because they don't want to worry you. They don't want to worry you. But if you have that ongoing conversation, it's just part of everyday life. So checking in is part of everyday life. It's no secret that we are as a nation, I suppose this is true globally, experiencing a crisis right now in terms of our mental and emotional health, especially among our kids, within adequate resources. That's right. So you represent a significant resource in an environment that is still way under-resourced. Yes, yeah. So you made reference earlier with mental health partners and we're talking about one part or one slice of mental health, right? And creating opportunities for kids to be engaged with adults who care about them in the interest of their health and stability. You're doing this in Boulder County and you're working with both school districts. What does that look like? What would you want parents to know? What do you want teachers to know about that work in the school districts? And if there are thresholds or aspirations, what would be your aspiration in terms of increasing profile or presence or reach? I'd like parents to know what Andy said and I want to reiterate what Andy said. When I speak with parents, parents that have little ones, their first question is, when should I start talking to my children about mental health? And my answer is, as soon as they come into the world, it's like Andy says, if they fall, how does that make you feel? If you're reading a book with them and somebody fell in the book, how do you think that made them feel? But we start using those feeling words, right? Because when they're little, if they can grow up to learn that they can talk about feelings with you, most likely when it gets harder in middle school and high school, which we all know those are some pretty tough times, they can have those conversations with us. Another thing I would say to parents is ask, it may be, I'm gonna try not to cry, it may be the hardest question you ever ask your child is if they wanna die or kill themselves. But if they say yes, at least you have a place to start. You can start that conversation and that's what we need. We need to be able to have those real conversations and know that now we can go seek the resources out. We can call rise against suicide, right? There's no shame. Our brains all think differently and that's okay. To parents, reach out to rise against suicide. We're here to help you. I talk to parents all the time. I welcome parents to call me. I wanted to talk about this and you're not alone ever. And to teachers, we're here. We're here to help. We'll come, I'll come talk to your school. I'll come talk to your other teachers. I love talking about rise against suicide and how we can help kids. To community members, reach out to rise again and learn. Learn from us. There's NAMI in the community. NAMI's a great mental health resource. I know that rise against suicide doesn't fix all mental health and that we focus on suicide specifically. For youth. For youth. Yeah, yeah. But I know that we're doing big work and all we wanna do is help. That's our only goal, is just to help. Parents, guardians, community members, teachers, schools and kids most importantly. If I wanna go back to my question about education, it sounds like education is a big part of it. Yes, it is. It's not a curriculum. It's educating parents and others and teachers and the community about how to respond, where the resources, how to be an agent to help in this whole initiative. You're right about that. We do talk to a lot of parents and a lot of parents ask, one more thing we should say, is parents ask if I talk to my kids about suicide, will it make them want to die by suicide? And the answer is no. The answer is you're not planting the idea. They've done studies about this because people wondered about that. If I talk about it, is it planting the idea? And a lot of people feel that that's true and it's not true. Studies have been done and what it does instead is make someone realize that you are a person who's willing to have a conversation. You're not scared of the conversation. You might be scared, but you're not projecting that. You're projecting that you're a person willing to have that conversation. In spite of the fear that you're leading. And sometimes the only way to know if someone is thinking about suicide is to ask them, have you been having thoughts about suicide? So you mentioned in your first year, or when, was it your first year in 2019 or in 2009? 2019 was my first year. But I'm talking when there were 50 kids. Oh yeah, that was like 2009. That was probably 20 kids. I mean it was, I think 50 is pretty generous because that was just being introduced into the community. So what's the scope and scale of the work you're doing today? Yeah, so last year we saw 361 kids. 161, 67, 167 of those kids were from Longmont. So pretty much half. They were from St. Frank Valley School District. And that is in, that's in the last 12 months or that was the calendar year 2022? No, yeah, last 12 months. We go fiscal year, yeah. So that was the last 12 months. We funded- 167 Longmont kids. Longmont kids. We funded 4,500 sessions. So our numbers have increased tremendously. So if anybody, not that anybody would question the statement that we're experiencing a crisis in terms of mental health, if you were looking for indicators to validate that, this would be a pretty powerful when it seems to me to go have gone from whether it was 20 or 50 to 300 plus and 4,500 sessions in the last 12 months with a pretty, I don't know if it's a damning indicator but certainly revealing indicator of what the level and the scope of the crisis. And there are other children who are getting therapy through other systems other than resident suicide. Kids who are going to, who have access to mental health care through insurance. Most of the kids we see don't have access to mental health care through insurance. Or they do, but there's a waiting list and they can't get in with somebody. And we will see children who have insurance if they can't get in because we know they can't wait. For kids, everything's very immediate. When they have those feelings, it's very hard to not act on those feelings. So we wanna make sure that they get seen right away. In order to fund 4,500 sessions for the 300 plus kids who have needed those sessions in this last year, you don't do that out of thin air. You described some of the staffing but you gotta have resources, both human and financial. You can't get the human resources and the expedited without the financial. So just talk about how rise against suicide is funded. Where does the money come from? And then I wanna drill down on how much that comes from long run. So our money comes from foundations, grants, individuals, and two events. So you have a couple of fundraising events and then people and then agent government. Yeah, we have some government. Yeah, we don't, I mean, we get some government but we don't get a lot of state. We were very fortunate to get ARPA funding this year and that'll go till 2025. To give you an idea of like this year's budget, our programming budget for this year will be 834,000 to be able to support what we need our kids and to support our programming. We work really hard to earn that money and not a lot of people know about us but I have a great board that really helps us raise funds and we have two fundraisers that, two of our fundraisers raise about 350,000 alone and that's pretty good considering they're not all that big, it's not a gala. We'll talk to them about fundraisers. Yeah, when I talk about fundraisers, how do you raise funds? Longmoners, pay real close attention to this. So this is one of the areas I'm really involved in on the board and I volunteered with Rise Against Suicide before I was a board member and helped with fundraising early on. We have two main fundraisers during the year. One is right around the November, December and we call it our Holiday Star Program and that's where we really turn to the community, to the businesses in our community and the faith community and we ask them if they will host either a tree or a starry light wall and what we do is we give the, if they say yes, they'll donate the space. We're not asking for money from these businesses. What we're asking for is the space so that when their patients come in, they can see an ornament and an ornament will have a child's name and age on it and they can sponsor therapy for that child. Now we don't use the actual names but we do use names and ages and that fit our demographic and so that's been very successful. We piloted that program, what was it, four years ago? With 10 locations and we now have 80 locations and about 20 of those were in Longmont last year which is wonderful. So that's like holiday time. When someone goes into a business, they're dry cleaners or coffee shop or wherever it is and they see this star, is it the star tree? It's either a tree or a starry light wall. We offer both options. Some people like a tree, some people would rather go more non-denominational and that's fine and it's an opportunity to sponsor therapy and they pick off a number or they can scan a scan code or there's Venmo code. We put all different options out there. However you want to make a donation, we'll take it. Yes. What we found is that the community is so supportive of our kids. We are, sometimes a business will call us and say we're out of stars, can you come back and fill the tree? There's nothing we like better than to run back there and do that because it means that people, not only are they supporting our children but they're finding out about our program when they do that. They go to our website to make the donation and they find out about what we do and they can tell that. Now they're a resource in the community for other people. So it's a fundraiser and it's an awareness razor. So that's in November and December and then in May, the first Sunday in May, every year we do a 5K at the Boulder Reservoir. We're the worst running group you've ever seen. Yes we are. It's not about the street. Some people do come and they're really fast and they're barren back before we were even halfway through. But a lot of us walk the 5K and it's at the Boulder Reservoir and it grew from about the first year we did it, probably at 180 people and last year we were close to 700 people at the reservoir. So that shows that this community wants to support our youth. During the pandemic we did it virtually and we made it free to register. What we found was that that brought in a lot more people and it didn't diminish the amount of money that we made because people were generous. They just gave and if they couldn't, we wanted it to be so that youth could come and not feel like they couldn't pay the entrance fee. So we want our teens to be able to come and run and the people who have money will have generously stepped up and donated money during that time. So we hope you'll come to the Boulder Reservoir, the first Sunday in May, we'll be there. What would you want? Whoever watches this, either live tonight or in a replay or rerun, you'd want them to put in their calendar a reminder. What's the date you want? It's gonna be early Christmas in May, but somewhere in April, two weeks out. What do you want them to be reminded? Oh yeah, now it's time to go and register for the 5K. Yes, so the 5K is May 5th, 2024 and you can start registering. We usually start registration about halfway through March and you can get online if you wanna be a sponsor of the event. We start sponsorships in February. If you wanna sponsor Holiday Star program as a business, we have sponsorships for that as well. A lot of businesses like to sponsor the events and if you want to volunteer with us and help us put starry walls up in trees in November, please do if you wanna come out and run walk, light run, come out and volunteer with us that day too. We welcome the help and we welcome the community because we can't do this work without our community. I wanna talk about another fundraiser, but if there's an audience member who wants to ask a question, you could come right over here so we can pick up the sound and we'll give, well if there's no pressure, if you wanna do that, come over here and as there might be assembling over here. I know that you speak to service organizations and I know that the Longmont Rotary Club is in the month of September committing all the money that's raised through a whole series of fundraising activities to rising and suicide. So that's another way, right? So service organizations that are always looking for worthy reasons to do fundraising and to know that the money's gonna be used in ways that are life-saving and life-changing, this would be an opportunity to do it. So Longmonters who might wanna figure out how to connect with that Longmont Rotary Club could contact you or they could contact me. And figure out, cause there's a bicycling activity and a walking activities, outdoor fun stuff in ways to contribute to rise against suicide. And we have other organizations that contact us and say we'd like to do a fundraiser for you. That has happened before we had the dads in Louisville. And we have a lot in September coming up too. Wild Boar catering, which is a Longmont business, is doing a farm dinner to benefit, rise against suicide. In September. In September. And so there are, if you run a business and you wanna do a fundraiser for us, just let us know. We're happy to be there and support the fundraiser in any way that you need us to and to put it out on our social media and in our newsletters. And we really need our community. We're doing this for our community, with our community. This is something that is co-created by all of us. Yeah. The question I'm gonna ask now, the intent is not to shame anybody, but it is to make a point about the kind of services that are provided to Longmont kids and how much of your funding comes from Longmont. So of the 167 kids, about half, maybe a little more than half, of the zero to 19 year olds who received services in this last 12 months. So let's say 50% of the case work. What percent of your total funding comes from Longmont? So when I break it down to Longmont, I'm gonna tell you how I break the numbers down. It costs, we say it's about $1,200 to serve a youth for a kiddo to come in and get the full services. So I base it on that number. About 33% comes from Longmont to be able to fund the Longmont kiddos. And that is individual donors and the city and then Longmont Community Foundation. And that's another thing I wanna tell people. You can donate through Longmont Community Foundation as well. We receive funding from them. And I think that's a nice way for people to donate. So for donor-advised funds? Yes, yeah. If you have a donor-advised fund, you can just reach out to Longmont Community Foundation and they make it really easy to donate to us. All right, well, I don't see anybody asking questions over here or in line to ask a question over here. Is there anything I haven't asked that you wish I had asked? You asked a lot of really good questions. Well, I don't even put you on the spot. I just don't, what's most important here is that you get to answer the questions that you want the public to hear answers to. So this year, some people ask, like, what do you look at this year? What do you think it's gonna look like? I think with reaching out to more of the schools and now that we have a program director, that's possible and creating more partnerships in the community, I think we'll serve more youth. I think we'll serve 450 and we'll serve well over that 4500 therapy session mark. A lot of people ask me what's the average number of therapy sessions that the kids see our therapist. It was eight when I started in 2019, it's now 10. We have kids. Another question that I receive that people sometimes wonder is, what if they have to go beyond 10? Our answer is then go beyond 10. If they need 20, 30, 40, we will fundraise so that kiddo can stay. Yeah, whatever they need if they're still suicidal, they will never leave our services until they're not feeling suicidal. So if somebody doesn't have the means to write a check, they don't have a donor advice fund, but they hear this or they learn about you in some other way and they wanna sign on, they wanna help, are there ways to do that? Yes, they can go to our website, there's a volunteer tab and you can click on that and fill out a volunteer form and we will call on you whether, and there is various things that you can do. Some people like to write thank you notes for us. That's really appreciated. We've had youth do that in the past as a volunteer thing through their schools, but it's great when we have other people doing that as well. Or if you like to go out and set up Starry Light walls and Christmas trees, we would love to have you help. And our 5K, we need people as root guidance and set up and people can on the day of the, well, when they register for the 5K, if you're running in memory of somebody, you can buy a butterfly, which goes on a little post and we have those lining the route. And so we need people that morning to come out with mallets and help us put line the route with those names and it's really, as I'm running or walking, I shouldn't say I run, I see people stopping at a butterfly and crying and holding each other because they're seeing the name of the person they love and they're remembering that. They're realizing that their child or their sister or their loved person, their neighbor is being remembered. And that is a gift to them. So come out and help us put up butterflies. There's so many things we do ahead of time. We make the stars to go on the trees. You can come help make the stars. There's lots of opportunities. So click on the volunteer tab and come work with us. There is no shortage of volunteer opportunities. Don't require a whole lot of training. No, oh no, yes. And bring your hands and your feet and your goodwill and help us save lives. All right. Anything else that I haven't asked? There's just one last thought, which is that I want us to remember that when we think about a suicidal youth, we're really thinking of a youth that is having thoughts of suicide. It's not who they are. It's a moment in time that they're experiencing suicidal thoughts. It's not the sum total of who they are. Nor is it the total of their life. And we just need to get them through that time. And if we can, they can go on to have long, happy lives. I believe there's hope and healing for our kids if we can just be there in the moment that they need it. And so we need to remember these are people. They're not suicidal people. They're just people who are going through a rough moment and we can be there. We can be a safety net for these people. That is the perfect way to wrap this up for your concluding comments. We started out thanking you for what you do every day. I want to say that again. I appreciate the fact that you did this tonight. I hope this gets huge viewership because the message is so important. The resource is so important. And I'm certain there'll be people who watch and listen. So I want to say to them and to you, thanks again for what you do every day. It's, I'm proud to be in a community that supports this. I'm proud to see people like you doing it every day. So thanks. Thank you so much. Thank you. Long months? That's the backstory on rise against suicide. We have a studio audience. Let's thank our guests here tonight. Thank you. So we're thanking you. I want to thank them. See you next month. Thank you.