What Makes It Work: Translating Evidence Into Sustained, Community-Led Youth Suicide Prevention in Rural Australia
Tracks
Prince
| Thursday, November 5, 2026 |
| 11:50 AM - 12:20 PM |
Overview
Laura Grattidge, Youth Live4live Ltd.
Three Key Learnings
1. Capability is built through systems, not programs.
Sustained impact relies on strengthening local leadership, partnerships, and community infrastructure. One-off programs rarely shift outcomes without supporting systems to enable coordination, ownership, and continuity.
2. Youth voice is a mechanism, not an add-on
Youth-led approaches increase relevance, shift culture, reduce stigma, and enable earlier peer-based support. When young people are meaningfully involved, engagement deepens and change more likely is sustained within communities.
3. Scale requires both consistency and flexibility
Clear core components, supported coordination, and embedded evaluation enable expansion, while local adaptation ensures relevance, strengthens ownership, and supports long-term sustainability.
Presenter
Laura Grattidge
Research And Evaluation Lead
Youth Live4live Ltd.
What Makes It Work: Translating Evidence Into Sustained, Community-Led Youth Suicide Prevention in Rural Australia
Presentation Overview
Background:
Building mental health-capable communities means moving beyond awareness to sustained, community-led action.
Live4Life is an evidence-informed youth mental health and suicide prevention model, implemented across multiple rural and regional Australian communities over the past 15 years. Grounded in a “for rural, by rural” approach, it integrates school-based education, youth leadership, community partnerships, and adult capacity-building. While outcomes such as improved mental health literacy and help-seeking are well-documented, less is understood about what it takes to make these models work and be sustainable over time.
Methods:
This presentation draws on over 15 years of evaluations of the Live4Life model across rural Australian communities, alongside real-world implementation case studies. A multi-perspective, mixed methods approach brings together insights from research, internal monitoring and independent evaluations, lived experience, system leadership, and on-the-ground delivery, to examine implementation processes, contextual influences, and sustainability in action.
Findings:
Findings highlight that successful implementation is not driven by program components alone, but by the conditions in which they are embedded. Key factors that are essential to consider and secure include strong local leadership, genuine youth engagement as a mechanism for change, and partnership governance that enables shared ownership and accountability. Common tensions that surface include balancing fidelity and local adaptation, navigating workforce and resource constraints, and maintaining momentum over time. Case study insights demonstrate how these challenges are negotiated in practice, and how communities move from initial awareness to sustained, collective action.
Conclusion:
Bridging the gap between evidence and implementation requires understanding how programs function within complex rural community systems. This presentation offers practical, experience-informed insights to support youth suicide prevention in locally relevant ways aligned with best practice.
Building mental health-capable communities means moving beyond awareness to sustained, community-led action.
Live4Life is an evidence-informed youth mental health and suicide prevention model, implemented across multiple rural and regional Australian communities over the past 15 years. Grounded in a “for rural, by rural” approach, it integrates school-based education, youth leadership, community partnerships, and adult capacity-building. While outcomes such as improved mental health literacy and help-seeking are well-documented, less is understood about what it takes to make these models work and be sustainable over time.
Methods:
This presentation draws on over 15 years of evaluations of the Live4Life model across rural Australian communities, alongside real-world implementation case studies. A multi-perspective, mixed methods approach brings together insights from research, internal monitoring and independent evaluations, lived experience, system leadership, and on-the-ground delivery, to examine implementation processes, contextual influences, and sustainability in action.
Findings:
Findings highlight that successful implementation is not driven by program components alone, but by the conditions in which they are embedded. Key factors that are essential to consider and secure include strong local leadership, genuine youth engagement as a mechanism for change, and partnership governance that enables shared ownership and accountability. Common tensions that surface include balancing fidelity and local adaptation, navigating workforce and resource constraints, and maintaining momentum over time. Case study insights demonstrate how these challenges are negotiated in practice, and how communities move from initial awareness to sustained, collective action.
Conclusion:
Bridging the gap between evidence and implementation requires understanding how programs function within complex rural community systems. This presentation offers practical, experience-informed insights to support youth suicide prevention in locally relevant ways aligned with best practice.
Biography
Laura Grattidge is Research and Evaluation Lead at Youth Live4Life and an adjunct Associate Lecturer in Rural Health at the University of Tasmania. A lived experience researcher, she works alongside communities to understand and strengthen rural youth suicide prevention. Laura completed her PhD in 2025 developing Best Practice Guidelines for Youth Suicide Prevention in Rural Australian Communities to support people at the community level. With a background across government, research and evaluation, her work focuses on translating evidence into practical, community-led action and supporting partnerships, youth leadership and place-based approaches to create lasting change in mental health and wellbeing.
