Hello friends, we hope you have had a wonderful spring and are heading into a double wonderful summer. We have many positives to report upon since our last newsletter!

We welcome Johneth Price to our board! Her intro highlights her chops as a long time postvention advocate: Hi my name is Johneth Price, I am a rising junior at Harvard University studying sociology with a minor in government. I grew up in Grand Junction, CO and spent much of my time in high school working on mental health and suicide prevention issues. I served on a student committee within Mesa County Valley School District to better address mental health in schools, as well as nonpartisan lobbying for mental health legislation in partnership with Western Colorado Alliance. I am thrilled to be able to work with the other board members of Postvention Alliance to not only bring my own insights but learn from everyone else’s varying experiences in the field. I am passionate about legislative processes as a means of seeking change so I hope to continue efforts to seek postvention legislation on the national level in my time on the board!

Click HERE to check out some of Johneth’s work with Western Colorado Alliance.

If you’d like to help support West Slope Youth Voice, Paddleboard Adventure Company is donating 10% of all paddleboard equipment rentals and tour bookings in the month of June to Western Colorado Alliance.

If you haven’t seen the new mural in the downtown GJ ANB bank parking lot, you’ve been missing out! We are very grateful to the City of Grand Junction Commission on Arts & Culture and Western Colorado Community Foundation for funding the project and to ANB Bank for donating the amazing canvas. The multi-tiered, multi-generational, mentorship aspect of the process was wonderful to see unfold. The excitement was evident on the last day of painting when the youth decided to paint into the night until they were finished.

Everyone had a fabulous time during the production of #WeHaveTheMic Mural project. We don’t save snippets of convos because guess what (?!?!) a local filmmaker made a documentary during the production of the mural!

We also extend gratitude, appreciation, and respect for all of the #WeHaveTheMic youth designers and artists, mentors, collaborators, and partners. Special shout outs to Harmony Creations, Stray Wild, Will Campbell Films, Sota Kishida, Juliá Peréz-Chavéz, BAM!, Action is Safer, West Slope Youth Voice, and Boa Organizing & Advocacy for their dedication to the youth. This project really showed us how well survivor-spectrum friend groups and families can work together for the public good.

We encourage everyone to support AnQi Yu’s Junktown Cinema Club, and especially to attend the July 2nd premier of Will Campbell’s documentary about the #WeHaveTheMic mural! We’ve heard that there will be some ubercool extra content, but we’re not at liberty to disclose the filmmaker’s artistic surprises.

Big thanks to Western Colorado Community Foundation and the Mike & Kay Ferris family for providing the seed money for this year’s Community Sources of Strength advocacy project.

These gifts gave us the ability to send our organizer - a provisional Sources of Strength trainer - out into the community to provide presentations to St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, The Butterfly Project, First Congregational UCC, West Slope Youth Voice leadership, homeschool leaders in Mesa County, and to several other individuals and groups around the Western Slope. Our focus was to encourage welcoming and affirming LGBTQ+ and BIPOC youth-serving organizations to offer Sources of Strength training to their own groups throughout our community.

And wow (!!!) our entire community owes a great big Atta’Educator (!!!) to Becky Vroman, St. Matthew’s director of youth and children’s ministries, for taking the lead in providing the first Community Sources of Strength training in Mesa County. If you haven’t met Becky, she and her husband Jason are past Mesa County Safe Schools Coalition & GLSEN leaders and are past One Colorado Ally Award winners. Thank you Becky!

On the evening of April 28th, twenty-four individuals, homeschool parents, and various community orgs - Postvention Alliance, West Slope Youth Voice, Karis, Butterfly Project, the Freedom Project, Americorps VISTA, Clifton Community, Grand Valley Education Coalition, the Feed, Junction Ally & Queer Connection - took Sources of Strength adult advisor training. We were very fortunate to hire María Luiza Peréz-Chavéz to provide the live Spanish translation, and we are thrilled that Sources of Strength has begun producing their materials in Spanish and now has a Spanish language trainer. The next night, on April 29th, another 20+ local youth and their adult advisors took Sources of Strength peer leader training. And Mish, if you’re listening, your training style is absolutely delightful!

We also want to highlight and thank the CDPHE Office of Suicide Prevention for funding to bring a national trainer to Mesa County.

And to the Western Colorado Writers’ Forum and WC-CF, a HUGE thank you for making the 2022 Youth Vision magazine issue possible. The Fruita Middle School students, Sources of Strength team, art teacher Jessica Shibata, and many of the admin worked together to make this issue possible. (Click on the magazine to read the whole issue.)

We’re extremely encouraged to have become acquainted with the work that participants are doing out in the world. Lina Vanegas’ @LinaLeadsWithLove adoptee advocacy, Timothy Bishop’s Encouraging the Light of Wellbeing, Karen Galinkin’s Denver bereavement group, and board member Kimberlee Bow’s new This Is Life YouTube channel.

The OSP is doing a great job by offering virtual meetings with closed captioning in English, and we look forward to a future with live Spanish translation as well.

We’ll be back with our next update in September. In the meantime, be on the lookout for Lithic’s second mental health writers’ public reading which will be organized by Sandra Eisenberg. Twitter followers have suggested a couple of cool things to try out this summer: Woebot and Madzines - let us know what you think?

And it always bears mentioning that we love our bookkeeper, Jill Burkey. Thanks for keeping our biz in order Jill!

Design, Learn, Paint, Teach, Write, Camera, Action!