LivingWorks Education receives 2002 Knowledge Broker Award

About the Awards | Presentation of the Award | Acceptance Remarks

2002 Canadian Policy Research
Knowledge Broker Award
National Policy Research Conference
Ottawa, Canada
October 24, 2002
Richard Ramsay, President
LivingWorks Education

Good evening Ladies and Gentleman.

Today, I realized how connected the theme of the conference Risk: Future Trends is to the prevention of suicide, locally, nationally and internationally. This morning General (Retired) Romeo Dallaire [former Commander UN Observer Mission in Uganda and Rwanda] very bluntly told us that what’s at risk is not the loss of strategic positions or access to coveted natural resources. What’s at risk is the loss of human lives and perhaps more importantly our beliefs in the humanity of others: caring about human life without strings attached. Suicide prevention is about preventable deaths. Suicide prevention is about fostering reasons to live in all humans. LivingWorks Education is about enhancing world resources for suicide prevention.

I accept this award with heartfelt thanks and incredible gratitude to the thousands of people who have contributed to the dissemination of ASIST, our first aid applied suicide intervention skills training program.

My thank you reflects a 35 year journey that started as a young social worker in Ottawa in 1967 and a serendipitous opportunity to become a co-founder of the Ottawa Distress Centre. I honor and thank Pat Delbridge, the Centre’s first administrator who had been a Samaritan befriender in England, and the dozens of volunteers who stepped forward to help others in times of distress and risk of suicide. Their ‘street’ smarts on many occasions taught me what was missing or underdeveloped at policy and education levels.

I thank the Canadian Mental Health Association of Alberta for their persistent mentoring of me in the art of becoming a policy development activist for suicide prevention.

I thank the Minister of Social Services and Community Health in Alberta for his faith that I could contribute at a provincial policy level in developing Alberta’s pioneering Alberta Model of Suicide Prevention in the early 1980s

I thank Prof. Jack Rothman a social work colleague at UCLA for his innovative social R&D – knowledge transfer - model that we have used for over 15 years to convert policy and basic knowledge about suicide into something akin to CPR in the health field that friends, neighbors, school teachers, counselors, co-workers, police members and hosts of others can quickly and competently apply to prevent the immediate risk of suicide.

I thank the University of Calgary’s Technology Transfer division and later its venture company, University Technologies International (UTI), for the risk they took in backing LivingWorks as their first education and training start-up company.

I thank the Policy Development Division of the United Nations in Vienna and New York who entrusted two of LivingWork’s principals with the responsibility of preparing the UN Guideline for national suicide prevention strategies on the strength of a letter I sent them describing suicide prevention initiatives as an example of Canada’s contribution to the implementation of the UN’s 1987 policy recommendations on developmental welfare. With funding support from several sources, especially Health Canada and Alberta Health, and the contributing support of colleagues from 12 countries, we were able meet their expectations.

Most of all, I thank the other co-founders of LivingWorks Drs. Bryan Tanney, Roger Tierney and Bill Lang, and more recently Tarie Kinzel and all1800 ASIST trainers for the opportunity of a life time to transfer social policy directives and evidence-based knowledge into a practical suicide prevention program that can be broadly disseminated in communities around the world. One only has to look at the WHO’s recently released Report on Violence and Health to discover that the annual loss of life by suicide equals all other violence caused deaths – all war and national strife casualties (civilian and military), and homicides, not to mention the millions more who are burdened by physical and emotional scars of abuse that is non fatal. The 300,000 ASIST caregivers in local communities throughout our great country and others are still a small force in a sea of more than 700,000 who die by suicide year in and year out.

I close my acceptance with a special tribute to our friend and colleague, Roger Tierney, who at only 51 lost his life to cancer in 1997 just as the full impact of his vision of caring for others was beginning to spread in a positive way almost as rapidly as the cancer spreading cells were racing through his unsuspecting body.

Thank you. Merci beaucoup.

Richard Ramsay
President
LivingWorks Education