PREVENTS Initiative | Six Years Later: How Arizona Turned the National PREVENTS Roadmap into a Blueprint for States
Statewide in AZ – (April 22, 2025) – Five years ago, on March 5, 2019, a national commitment was made at the highest level of government. I witnessed firsthand President Trump signing Executive Order 13861 in The White House, launching the PREVENTS initiative—The President’s Roadmap to Empower Veterans and End a National Tragedy of Suicide. It called for a bold, unified response to one of the most urgent public health challenges of our time – veteran suicide. It asked states and communities to be full partners in building a coordinated, upstream approach to suicide prevention for veterans and their families.
A National Commitment, A Local Response
In Arizona, we didn’t just answer that call, we built the infrastructure relationships and cultivated the coordination to make it happen. One of the core challenges identified in the original PREVENTS initiative was the lack of coordination with nearly 70% of veterans who die by suicide had not recently accessed care through the VA. In Arizona, we took that challenge to heart and built a coordinated solution. The Be Connected Support Line, staffed by a dedicated, Arizona-based team, is a gateway into the system for any service member, veteran, and their families. Anyone can call and make a referral on behalf of someone who served. What makes the Be Connected support line effective is the relationships behind it. Our support line team works hand-in-hand with the Arizona Department of Veterans’ Services and the VA healthcare system to ensure care is coordinated, not siloed. In Arizona, it doesn’t matter which door a veteran knocks on—we all answer. That’s what coordination looks like in action, and that’s why it works.
Coordinating Arizona’s Connection
Since 2019, the Arizona Coalition for Military Families has served as the backbone community-based organization driving this effort forward in our state. Through Be Connected, our statewide prevention initiative, we’ve worked tirelessly to align with the goals of the national PREVENTS Roadmap. We’ve built partnerships that span the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. We’ve created the connective tissue between systems. And we’ve focused relentlessly on upstream prevention, helping service members, veterans, and their families long before a crisis occurs.
Prevention Starts Long Before Crisis
Early in our formation, while working with the Arizona National Guard in 2009, the Arizona Coalition for Military Families understood that to truly save lives, we couldn’t rely solely on crisis intervention. We deeply value the crisis model, it plays a vital role in moments of acute need, but we recognized that it wasn’t the only answer. We knew that taking a proactive posture through an upstream prevention model would be a powerful and necessary complement. With upstream prevention, we have more time to respond, more opportunities to connect, and more ways to address or even prevent the stressors that can lead someone to consider suicide as an option. That understanding shaped the foundation of Be Connected, which has grown into a statewide system focused on building protective factors, strengthening community, and engaging people long before a moment of crisis. Arizona is leading the way in showing what’s possible when prevention starts early, and care is truly coordinated.
Nation’s First Veteran Suicide Mortality Review Team
Through the PREVENTS Initiative, the President tasked the federal government to advance its understanding of the underlying causal factors of veteran suicide. In Arizona, we’ve taken that call to action seriously by establishing the Veteran Suicide Mortality Review Team (VSMRT), of which the Arizona Coalition for Military Families is a founding member. Arizona is the first state in the nation to stand up such a team that conducts in-depth reviews of every suicide death of a service member or veteran in our state to better understand the full context of each life lost. This work was recognized by Governor Katie Hobbs during her remarks at our 15th Annual Statewide Symposium in April 2025, where she highlighted the importance of learning from these tragedies to drive meaningful change.Â
Community Guide to Postvention
In direct response to the findings of the VSMRT, we created the Community Guide to Postvention, a practical, action-oriented resource that turns insight into immediate support for families, organizations, and communities affected by suicide. We believe that postvention after a suicide is the prevention of future suicide.
Arizona Turned the Roadmap Into a Blueprint
PREVENTS gave us a roadmap. Arizona built the road. And now, we offer it as a blueprint for other states to follow. We know, as PREVENTS reminds us, that suicide is not just a veteran issue, it’s a national issue. And veterans don’t live in silos. They are part of families, workplaces, and communities. That’s why Arizona’s approach integrates mental health, employment, housing, peer support, and a full range of protective factors. It’s why we built the Be Connected support line, trained thousands of helpers, and created a coordinated referral system that spans our state.
Through Be Connected, we’ve engaged every major sector—healthcare, faith, education, criminal justice, employment, and housing—in this work to make sure we have a holistic network to address the social determinants of health. We’ve made it easier for people to seek support through the Be Connected support line and we address the unique needs of service members, veterans, and their families through collaboration, trust, and a shared commitment to saving lives.
The PREVENTS Roadmap laid out ten key recommendations, from developing a national public health campaign to identifying and scaling community-based models. Arizona’s work checks all of those boxes—and adds a few of our own. We’ve demonstrated what it looks like to turn a federal vision into local, lasting action.
