The Fire Watch Project

Our key veteran suicide prevention innovation is The Watch stander program. It was launched in may 2020 and is an upstream, on-line and in-person, early intervention network of community volunteers trained to identify risk factors of veterans in crisis and to direct those veterans to The resources they require, including The veteran crisis line, 211 or our veteran resources guide. Modeled after cpr, our Watch stander program is The first of its kind in The country. It is available free on our website. Training takes just 30 - 45 minutes. We trained 3,100 Watch standers as of december 31, 2022. Our goal is a network of 5,000 Watch standers by The end of 2023. The Fire Watch maintains veteran suicide data for each of The 67 counties in Florida, sortable by age, gender, race and means. It uses this data to measure The success of its programs and identify high risk areas to focus prevention programming. In february 2022, The Fire Watch collected and analyzed data for The calendar year 2020, reporting county-specific Florida data six months ahead of The department of veterans affairs. In 2021, The Fire Watch launched an organizational version of The Watch stander program called The veteran safe place program (vsp). Business, churches, and other organizations which qualify 50 employees or 50% of employees (whichever is smaller) as Watch standers earn this designation. The Fire Watch uses this program to focus its expansion of The Watch stander community support network. For example, when our data identifies a particular geographic veteran suicide hotspot, we can reach out to organizations in that area and encourage their participation in The program. As of december 31, 2022, The Fire Watch trained 51 vsps. The Fire Watch Project's primary objective is to reduce veteran suicides in Florida by 25% over 3 years when compared against baseline 2019 veteran suicide data. Two years have been measured so far. 2019 veteran suicides in Florida were 636. 2020 veteran suicides were 542. 2021 veteran suicides were 612.

The Fire Watch Project Inc. was awarded a grant by The state of Florida in october 2022 to provide advanced suicide prevention, suicidality screening, and de-escalation training to all Florida department of veterans' affairs (fdva) veteran claims examiners (vces) and county veteran service officers (cvsos) across The state. Called The Florida veteran overwatch program, The training was built in q4 2022.