The Sutter Yuba Strategic Suicide Prevention Plan is a result of collaboration between Yuba and Sutter Counties’ community members, stakeholders, education departments and multiple organizations. We first had a kickoff meeting on 8/10/23 @ 3:00PM that was held both in person and via ZOOM and we had approximately 25 people attend.

We used information collected in these initial conversations and feedback to begin writing the plan. We then conducted interviews with key informants from different communities including Latino/Latinx, Punjabi, Hmong, the Armed Forces, and LGBTQ+, among others. To extend our reach and get additional feedback we created a survey on 8/31/23 and emailed that to over 40 community members and encouraged those receiving the email to share the survey with others. We had 35 survey responses. These responses included important feedback that you will see included in the plan.

You’ll notice that the plan has some broad goals and objectives but does not include specific action steps.  Our vision was to have a strong structure in the suicide prevention plan to build on with specific actions. We would like this plan to act as a living document that is molded by our communities to continuously address our local needs of suicide prevention and postvention. At this time, we are gathering people together to be a Suicide Prevention Team that will meet and work on identifying the steps to implement this plan. To assist with this project, we have found consultants that will lead this team, Sandra Black and Noah Whitaker. Sandra Black, has over 20 years of experience working in mental health and suicide prevention at the federal, state, and community levels. She led the California Office of Suicide Prevention in finalizing and implementing the state’s first strategic plan for suicide prevention and helped develop a resource center to support suicide prevention efforts throughout California. She has also been a great asset and support for writing our own Strategic Suicide Prevention Plan. Noah has worked in the mental health field for more than 20 years with efforts centered around serving those with severe and persistent mental illness, the unhoused, the substance-addicted, and numerous other populations. He has helped write plans for California’s Proposition 63: The Mental Health Services Act and for the last decade he has consulted with communities in strategic planning and implementation of suicide prevention efforts.  We are excited for them to help us further shape our plan.

 If you would like to sign up for more information about the Sutter Yuba Suicide Prevention Team, please click Join The Team below. You will receive emails about upcoming meetings you can attend, as well as recaps about our discussions.

For more information you can email Carrie Patania at cpatania@co.sutter.ca.us.

To read the Sutter Yuba Strategic Suicide Prevention Plan click HERE.