Facilitating the first national gathering of a suicide prevention movement
It would not have been as good an event without Habitus. We could not have done it without them. We had excellent feedback from the people who attended, and the way they held the space compassionately but also got something so tangible out of it went beyond my expectations
- Maddy Kirkman, United to Prevent Suicide
Bringing a movement together in person
United to Prevent Suicide had reached an important moment. After a period of dormancy, the movement was rebuilding its real-world activity, with local groups, learning opportunities, and plans for a national gathering. A membership engagement project had surfaced something the movement needed to respond to, which was that members did not yet feel they had ownership of the project, and some remained unclear about, or unconvinced by the social movement model.
The Big Meet Up was the answer to that. It was the first national gathering of the movement, an opportunity to bring people together in person, to draw on the expertise of people with lived and living experience alongside professional practice, and to shape a Declaration the movement could take forward. It was crucial that it was co-produced, so that every person left with a sense that they had created a part of it and had a stake in the future of the movement.
United to Prevent Suicide asked Habitus to be their facilitation partner for the day.
Challenges
People came to the day with different relationships to suicide, through bereavement, through their own suicidal thoughts, through supporting someone they love, and through professional roles, often layered with personal experience as well. Designing a day in this context called for a trauma-informed approach throughout, holding care at the centre of everything, and creating a space where people could be vulnerable without being asked to prove or perform their lived experience through disclosure.
The day also had to do two things at once. It had to create genuine connection and warmth, and it had to produce something tangible and lasting that the movement could use. A day event goes by quickly, and the design had to make sure that the feeling in the room and the practical output strengthened each other within the time available.
How we made a difference
We worked as a facilitation partner from planning through to evaluation, designing the day backwards from what the movement wanted to walk away with, so that the feeling in the room and the tangible output strengthened each other.
Co-producing the design with the Steering Group. We began by working with the Steering Group to shape the approach, draw on connections within the membership, and agree an agenda that felt right. This kept the day grounded in what members themselves wanted, and meant the design carried the movement's own priorities from the start.
Preparing people before the day. We fed into pre-attendance communications, framing participation around belonging and making clear that not everyone needed to speak, and that presence itself was just as important. Several people said the care taken beforehand had put them at ease and given them confidence the day would go well, with one calling the preparation fabulous and the communication warm and kind.
Designing for connection and for output. We built the day around a series of creative activities that gave people different ways into the same questionsAn icebreaker got people talking and laughing before anything heavier, storytelling circles invited people to share moments when someone had shown up for them, Postcards from the Future asked people to write back from a Scotland in 2029 where change had happened, and activity walls let people add their own words to the questions the movement was asking of itself. This range suited the mix of experience in the room, and one person wrote with relief that the day had not asked people to talk too much about their lived experience, so the connections that formed were human ones. We asked people to take on volunteer roles across the day, supporting the activities, the scribing, and the building of the Declaration, so the day felt like something made with people. One design choice ran through everything, which was the decision to leave job titles at the door. It flattened hierarchy from the moment people arrived, and it was singled out in the evaluations as something that opened everyone up from the start.
Holding the space with care. We opened with a low-pressure icebreaker and a dissolving paper ritual, where people wrote what they were carrying and let it dissolve unread, a moment to arrive fully and connect their own experience with the purpose of the day. These quiet, well-designed activities did a great deal of the work, breaking the tension early and letting people settle before being asked to engage with anything harder. Throughout the day we managed the energy and the timekeeping and held the emotional weight of the subject with care, and the facilitation was named again and again in the evaluations, with people describing it as fabulous, excellent, and amazing, and the space as held well and clearly.
Co-developing the Declaration. Every activity fed material into a single collective output. Across the day, people worked on who they are, what they value, what makes their community different, what unites them, and what change they want to make. Their words were captured and woven into a Declaration that the group refined and agreed together. It belongs to the movement because the movement wrote it.
Building evaluation into the day. We wove evaluation through the day itself, drawing on the activities, the scribe notes, and the evaluation forms, so that what the day surfaced could shape a set of strategic considerations for the Steering Group to work through as the movement grows..
Results
The evaluation gives a clear picture of how the day was experienced, drawn from the forms returned by the large majority of participants.
People left the day in a noticeably different emotional state from the one they arrived in. The words that came up most often were hopeful, connected, energised, inspired, empowered, proud, and motivated. Several people had arrived feeling depleted by the work or by the state of the world, and one captured the shift directly, writing that they had been feeling hopeless about the future of suicide prevention and were leaving with a new sense of life and a sense of action. Connection was the single word that appeared most across the forms, with people writing about easy and authentic connections, about contacts turning into possible friendships, and about feeling not alone.
The day also produced its central output. The Declaration was co-produced by the room and lands as an authentic, collective statement of what people recognised, valued, and wanted to protect. People named it warmly in their evaluations, with one describing it as very moving and powerful, and another writing that it might well be a starting point for them in their professional life. The Declaration was then turned into a short film the movement can share and return to.
The Postcards from the Future captured the hope people were leaving with, and the picture they painted of what the movement could become. As one person wrote, imagining themselves looking back from 2029, "from a small ripple we became a gentle giant wave that helped drive through change."
Beyond the day itself, we gave United to Prevent Suicide a shared reference point for who they are, clearer language for describing what makes the movement distinctive, and a set of strategic considerations for how to hold and grow the community through the phase that comes next.
The impact of the day reached beyond the room. What the Big Meet Up produced helped secure additional funding for the movement.
Event Participant: "[I feel] hopeful. I really needed that. I had been feeling hopeless about the state of the world and the future of suicide prevention, and I am leaving with a new sense of life and a sense of action."
Habitus has deep expertise in facilitating in contexts where trauma and difficult experiences are present, and in helping groups create something they genuinely own together. If you are bringing people together around a shared purpose, and you want a day that holds care and produces something lasting, get in touch.
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