Suicide Awareness Voices of Education is a nationally chartered suicide prevention and awareness organization founded in 1989 by Adina Wrobleski after her daughter killed herself 10 years prior.

Since then, SAVE has founded 20 charters nationwide, working with their local communities to host events that spread public awareness, bringing guest speakers to schools, organizing community education programs such as Let’s Talk About It and LEADS: For Youth, conducting public research studies and accepting donations for all of their operations that help keep people alive.

In January of 2015, the city of Oswego became the first charter of SAVE in central New York after working with the organization on their annual 5K run/walk, which was partnered with a similar organization for its first year of operation in 2010. After a bit of research by the campus committee, however, SAVE seemed to be a better fit for Oswego State. The founding members of the CNY SAVE charter, as they are now officially known, contacted the executive director in Minneapolis, Minnesota and began working with them on the flagship Strive to SAVE Lives event, held every fall semester.

All eight committee members help to set up and table the event, but a lot of assistance also comes from Mary Walker Health Center’s Peer Educators from both the Counseling Services Center (P2Ps) and the Lifestyles Center. SAVE treasurer Shelly Sloan is also involved with the Lifestyles Center as the Health Promotion Coordinator, and while not technically part of SAVE, Sloan said the Lifestyles students’ help with the event never goes unappreciated.

“I had several students who volunteered at the event who were there from 7 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon volunteering their time. We try to involve them in different ways,” Sloan said. “My two worlds kind of collide at this event, so it’s nice to bring them together.”

Mariah Santana, one of the eight team members of CNY SAVE, is an Oswego State senior who originally started as a volunteer. She wrote a personal speech that was given at the most recent Strive to SAVE Lives event in September, and was asked to become part of the planning committee. She now works with Sloan and other committee members in their event planning for 2018, arranging other SAVE events, and their monthly suicide support group.

Santana said she decided to volunteer with SAVE after the loss of her boss’ son to suicide in August of 2014. Ever since, she, her boss and her supervisor had been volunteering at the Strive event, something she says has been a pleasure to be a part of.

“It’s been great. It’s one of the only events around here of its kind,” Santana said. “It’s growing every year, definitely drawing a lot more attention, and I really enjoy it.”

Grace Maxon-Clarke is another member of CNY SAVE’s planning committee and took the role of volunteer coordinator for September’s Stride event. She has worked closely with members like Sloan and Santana in club operations, but also knows about the researching of SAVE’s national organization that took place when the Oswego board made the switch in 2011. She said the biggest factor that attracted them to SAVE was their research-based background.

“Everything that they do comes from research that they’ve done. They aren’t just picking something and saying, ‘We’re going with this because we feel it’s right.’ They’re doing it because they’ve done the research to really know that this is the path they should be taking when it comes to preventing or spreading awareness about suicide prevention,” Maxon-Clarke said.

Active Minds is another campus organization that promotes mental health and encourages help-seeking for those who are suffering.

Through their table displays in the Marano Campus Center and weekly discussion meetings, they also have a hand in helping to stop suicide. Their members helped to promote SAVE’s Strive event, participating and volunteering.

Active Minds Co-President Brionna Moore said that it is very important to have organizations like these on campus participating in one another’s events so that a good message is spread about how much the student body cares about the mental health of all students.

“We don’t want people to feel like they’re alone,” Moore said. “If they know there’s an entire organization out there for them to either join or find support from, then they know that others out there either care about what they’re dealing with or deal with it themselves.”

SAVE would like to make even more of an impact on the campus community in the future, Sloan said. However, she said, eight members is not enough to coordinate all the events they have plans for.

“People say, ‘It would be so cool if you could do this,’ and it would be, but we need bodies to help us do it,” Sloan said. “So, if we could have more volunteers, that would be awesome.”

Graphic: Rachel Futterman | The Oswegonian