For the next decade, I worked in 12 countries, training organisations and people such as the US Military, the ADF, Police, Ambulance Officers, CFA, Lifeline Aus & NZ, Relationships Australia, Mission Australia, Salvation Army, Prison Wardens in Belfast, Psychiatry Professors in South Korea, the Choose Life Strategy in Scotland, helping with the Galway Suicide Prevention Strategy in Ireland and Universities and schools in multiple countries, among many others.

At one point I was appointed by the Ministerial Council for Suicide Prevention in Western Australia as the OneLife Suicide Prevention Strategy Community Coordinator for 750,000 square kilometres in WA which included working with outback mining towns and indigenous communities. Along the way I collaborated with and advised politicians, government department heads, schools, NGO’s, NFP’s and worked with many experienced and well respected trainers and leaders in the field of suicide prevention, critically learning from each encounter and relationship.

By 2010, I recognized the limitations of my individual efforts and partnered with a group of professionals and co-founded the National Centre for Suicide Prevention Training Inc. This organisation trained thousands of organisations, individual professionals, and concerned members of the public in suicide first aid skills and is still operating very successfully in Western Australia.

I also developed the Suicide Safer Communities Framework that would assist communities, groups and organisations to develop and implement their own suicide prevention strategy. This represented a departure from simply training and so I set up my new organisation, Suicide Safer Communities Inc. and transitioned away from focusing solely on training individuals to the broader focus of empowering and equipping communities in whatever form they may take.

In 2013, Suicide Safer Communities received government funding to implement the Framework in schools across Melbourne and researched by Federation University. Due to the resounding success of the project, it was then extended to other schools in Australia and internationally.

One element of the SSC Framework was education and training, but the available programs were not quite fit for purpose, so work began on developing different bespoke programs to address specific needs. Over many years, multiple programs were researched, developed, field-trialled and rolled out addressing the needs of different sectors of the population in their specific contexts, such as for youth workers in India for an example.

But to address the needs of any one unique individual, and to help them enhance their personal resilience and increase their psychological safety level, the process needed to evolve. And so, in 2017, Suicide Safer Communities Inc became Help Net and, in addition to educating the community to look after themselves and each other, I began to focus on harnessing the joint powers of Human Intelligence (HI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assess the psychological safety levels of individuals and groups and provide recommendations as to how they may achieve the desired level of psychological and suicide safety and enhanced resilience.

The Aggregate Suicide Safety Assessment Tool or ASSAT was born. Over many years, and with the assistance of funding from multiple government and philanthropic sources, ASSAT became the world’s first HI/AI powered tool that gave an ‘in real-time’ assessment of the strengths in an individual’s life that could be enhanced, along with highlighting the areas of a person’s life that needed to be fortified and strengthened so that when the storms of life came, as they inevitably do, the individual could stand strong and cope with a sense of hope.

The field-trial for ASSAT was the ‘ASSAT Upper Murray Project’ in Victoria which was the subject of a documentary detailing their journey from a place of fear and despair, having lost multiple young people to suicide in a short period of time, to one of hope and looking forward to the future. Of being able to take proactive action toward greater wellbeing and psychological safety.

The ‘ASSAT Upper Murray Project’ won a Resilient Australia Award in 2022.

During the development process of ASSAT my colleagues and I were invited to present at the joint Sunway University, Oxford University and Cambridge University Suicide Prevention Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2019. I delivered a 3 hour lecture focusing on suicide prevention from the perspective of the ‘Power of Hope’. The response was overwhelmingly positive and was the genesis of the new refined focus of using the power of hope to create a greater level of psychological safety and resilience in the life of individuals
and communities.

Finally in 2023, the transition from Help Net to the HOPE WELL INSTITUTE was complete.

Over 30 years our organisation, team and focus has evolved but the vision and mission remain the same – to empower and equip each unique individual to enhance their own wellbeing and transform communities, one life at a time.

The team is excited for the future and hopes that you will partner with us in this worthwhile endeavour.