Thanks to a five-year grant received in 2022 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for children’s mental health and suicide prevention, Wisconsin is a little closer to its goal of being proactive around the issues.

Wisconsin Department of Health Services will oversee the CDC grant, and has contracted with Mental Health America of Wisconsin (MHA) to design and implement the program. In turn MHA has contracted with the ‘Sources of Strength’ program ‘Connect Strength’ to implement it statewide. Overseeing this initiative will be Katrina Johnson of rural Soldiers Grove.

 ‘Connect Strength’ will take on the ‘increase access to Sources of Strength for youth ages 10 to 19 years’ part of the Wisconsin Comprehensive Suicide Prevention (CSP) plan. They will also intersect with initiatives throughout each county to expose more communities to the Adult Advisor/Community Training of Sources of Strength.

“As a result of a decision by the Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee, School-Based Mental Health Services grant funding for children’s mental health and suicide prevention will no longer go just to schools that apply for the grants and have a plan in place,” Johnson explained. “While this means that overall, the funding for the schools that had previously applied for the grants will be about a third of that anticipated, nevertheless, it means that all schools in the state will receive this funding on a per-pupil basis.”

According to North Crawford Elementary Principal, Amanda Killeen, the implications of eliminating the School Based Mental Health grants is quite tangible. For example, North Crawford, originally anticipated receiving $75,000 from the grant, and will now receive approximately $17,000 from the statewide per-pupil distribution. Prairie du Chien and North Crawford had applied for a combined total of $150,000 annually for the years 2023-2025.

Johnson said that what is key to ensure that schools use these funds for the purpose for which they are intended is good communication between school administrators with teaching and counseling staff, and support in developing a plan within the school.

That’s where Johnson’s group, ‘Connect Strength’ comes into play. The parent group of ‘Connect Strength’ is the Denver-based ‘Sources of Strength’ organization. Johnson has been active regionally for the last few years in helping to develop this program in schools, working with 17 school districts in Southwest Wisconsin. Now her focus has been expanded to statewide.

Recently, ‘Connect Strength’ trainings were offered in Prairie du Chien and Platteville. Last week, three national trainers came to Gays Mills for a four-day Sources of Strength ‘train-the-trainer’ advanced skills event at the Community Commerce Center. The event attracted 52 teachers, school administrators, and non-profit professionals from across the state of Wisconsin, as well as from the Minnesota Association of Children’s Mental Health, and from a non-profit organization based in Texas.

‘Connect Strength’ will offer Wisconsin school districts the opportunity to register for the August 21-22 ‘Elementary Sources of Strength Coaches Training’ in Gays Mills. To learn more or to register for the event, go to https://connectstrength.com/events-calendar/.

Misha Moore was one of the ‘Sources of Strength’ national trainers at last week’s training event in Gays Mills.

“Sources of Strength is a radically ‘upstream’ teen suicide prevention program, with a focus on preventive factors and building strengths,” Moore explained. “Our program is research and evidence-based, and is really about building ways into schools to help avoid having youth getting into a crisis mode.”

Moore said that the program starts with training adults, who then go on to identify staff and students they can work with to be leaders in fostering norms of help-seeking within the school setting. At the middle and high school level, because student peers are involved, those students can model the behavior of seeking out adults that can help them or support them in seeking help.

“The role of students as peers is of helping to connect other students to help,” Moore clarified. “The students are agents of change, but it is never on them to be the ones to solve the problem.”

Although longitudinal studies of the efficacy of the approach are in progress, Moore said that anecdotally, this approach appears to have increased student’s level of feelings of belonging, decreased absences, and increased student’s grades and academic performance.

“When you feel you belong and your life is not on fire, then it is easier to be successful in your academics,” Moore explained. “It’s not that kids won’t have stress, but rather that they will have the tools they need to be able to deal with it.”

Citing research and evaluation of student trends within schools where a Sources of Strength team has been implemented, Moore said that students are four-times more likely to help connect a friend to help after program implementation.

“After Sources of Strength has been implemented, the number of referrals within a school goes up, and the intensity of situations is decreased,” Moore stated.

Moore said that when a school builds a team, they help practice and give tools for living out healthy norms and developing coping mechanisms. The team will develop campaigns within the school that fit with the local and school context where students and staff can learn about resilience and how to develop strengths.

“It’s basically a way to help people within the school develop healthy relationships, and to get people talking to each other,” Moore said. “It’s a holistic approach that can help students access a mentor or mental health services, and empower them to find their own strengths.”

Sources of Strength’s vision, according to their website is ‘To Empower a Well World.’ They provide exceptional training and curriculum for youth and adults, utilizing a strength-based and upstream approach to mental health promotion and prevention of adverse outcomes like suicide, violence, bullying, and substance misuse.  Sources of Strength has a firm commitment to providing evidence-based programming that is responsive to local community context and needs.

Moore explained that she thinks of the Sources of Strength model as a method to transition three different paradigms along a continuum between two modes:

• Focus: transition from sad, shock, trauma to hope, help and strength

• We are not the sum of our risk factors: transition from focusing on risks to focusing on strengths

• Youth and adult connections: transition from adult-led to peer-led with adult oversight.

“The upstream approach to child mental health and suicide prevention is similar to the idea of looking at land use upstream to help prevent the storm water runoff that can contribute to flooding,” Moore explained. “We want to move the focus away from a reactive crisis intervention mode, and toward a proactive building strengths mode.”

Sources of Strength was founded by a man named Mark LoMurray. It is based in Denver, Colorado, with half of the staff working remotely all over the United States. In addition to the U.S., Sources of Strength programs have also been implemented in Canada and Israel.

LoMurray and his team, while working in juvenile justice as the head of the Police Youth Bureau in North Dakota, were involved in statewide intervention and crisis response with teenagers and their families. At the time, North Dakota had some of the highest teen suicide fatality rates in the nation, and over a period of three years in his position, he attended many funerals of teenagers.

Some of these deaths were results of drunk driving accidents, some were accidental overdoses, and many were suicides. He came away from this experience with a profound sense that more could be done to get ahead of these issues, and move beyond reactionary and crisis-driven responses.

In 1998, LoMurray left his job in North Dakota to begin what would become Sources of Strength, with the vision to move further upstream in prevention efforts.

Sources of Strength is presently partnering with thousands of elementary, middle, and high schools across the United States and Canada.  Sources also works with dozens of universities large and small, LGBTQ+ centers and organizations, cultural community centers, faith-based groups, detention centers, the military, and much more.

Today, there are active ‘Sources’ teams in most U.S. states and Canadian Provinces, in rural, urban, suburban, tribal and Indigenous communities all across North America.

Sources of Strength for middle and high school trains groups of Peer Leaders supported by Adult Advisors to run ongoing public health messaging campaigns to increase wellness and decrease risk in their schools. The ‘Train the Trainer’ process supports implementation at the middle and high school levels.

Rather than training selected Peer Leaders, Sources Elementary is implemented as a universal classroom-based Social Emotional Learning curriculum. The model incorporates the Sources of Strength protective factor framework, more robust language on mental health, and a prevention lens that many elementary social and emotional learning models lack. The Coaches Training process supports elementary implementation.