Advance Brighter Futures raising awareness of suicide prevention through safeTALK

A Wrexham-based mental health charity is working to raise awareness of the importance of suicide prevention through the ‘safeTALK’ initiative.

Advance Brighter Futures (ABF), on Belmont Road, provides suicide alertness workshops in the community.

safeTALK, a worldwide recognised training course designed by Living Works, empowers everyone to make a difference.  It gives participants the opportunity to learn how to prevent suicide by recognising signs, engaging someone, and connecting them to an intervention resource that can offer further support.

ABF’s Chief Officer Lorrisa Roberts, who delivers the workshops, said: “We have just delivered one of the safeTALK workshops earlier this week, and we have another planned for October that people can register for.

“The workshop helps participants recognise people who have thoughts of suicide and shows them how to connect with someone who can help further.”

ABF has recently been awarded two grants towards their ‘core’ costs, which helps them to continue to provide important services like the upcoming suicide awareness workshops.

The first grant is from the Garfield Weston Foundation; a family-founded grant-maker that gives money to support a wide variety of charities across the UK.

The second comes from Postcode Community Trust; a grant-giving charity funded entirely by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

Zoe Whitehead the charity’s Business Development Officer said: “We’d like to give our thanks to our funders the Garfield Weston Foundation and players of People’s Postcode Lottery.

“With their support we can continue to work with our local community to raise awareness for suicide prevention as well as supporting people to improve their mental health, as we have been doing for the last 30 years.”

To learn more about Advance Brighter Futures, please visit https://www.advancebrighterfutures.co.uk/. To find out about bespoke mental health and wellbeing courses/workshops for you or your organisation you can email [email protected]