Roots of Hope Case Study – Innovative/Flexible

Innovative guiding principle: Attempt, evaluate, and share creative and innovative ideas to advance suicide prevention efforts globally.

Flexible guiding principle: While standardization is important when comparing communities or tracking progress over time, be sure that selected interventions can be tailored to the community for which they are being implemented.

While the guiding principles should be viewed as a whole (to ensure coherence and a standardized approach and allow comparisons between communities over time), each offers important considerations for how a community designs and implements their local initiative.

The Innovative guiding principle encourages projects to undertake “safe fail” experiments that help create never-before-offered approaches to suicide prevention.

The Flexibility guiding principle challenges project leads and community partners to use an evidence-informed approach that can adapt and experiment with the best ways to tailor strategies to the local community’s unique realities.

Project leads identified 4 key themes in connection to these two principles:

1. Create the conditions for innovation — Project leads play an important role in creating the conditions that help innovative thinking thrive.
2. Recognize that innovation and program delivery are different — Creating something new is quite different from implementing a proven program or approach. Innovation has more risk, and many of us have little experience with it.
3. Sow many seeds — Because there’s rarely a single solution to suicide prevention, experiment with different options and learn from them.
4. Embrace a flexibility mindset — A desired outcome can usually be reached in different ways. If one path is blocked, consider alternatives.

This case study explores how project leads integrated these 2 principles and the insights they offered about their benefits and challenges.

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