Possible Always Presents at the 10th Annual Florida Suicide Prevention Coalition Conference
“The Belonging Paradigm”
Possible Always was honored to present at the 10th Annual Florida Suicide Prevention Coalition Conference on Wednesday, February 25, 2026.
Our session, “Belonging Paradigm: Lived Experience in the Crisis Care Continuum,” was presented by Hannah Hackworth, LCSW, MBA, and Jason Kimmins, CRS. The workshop invited participants to explore how lived experience can be meaningfully integrated into crisis care operations, workforce resilience, and suicide prevention service design.
While peer support has been shown to increase engagement in mental health recovery, improve outcomes, and reduce healthcare costs, there remains limited research on peer support as a direct suicide prevention intervention. For 988 centers and crisis care providers, this gap also represents an opportunity: to better understand how lived experience can strengthen both the people receiving support and the helpers providing it.
The session challenged participants to reflect on some of the most urgent questions facing crisis care:
How do we support the people who show up for others in their darkest moments?
How do we respond to vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout in ways that go deeper than surface-level wellness strategies?
How do we create systems that support familiar callers and high-risk community members with dignity, consistency, and hope?
And how do we help crisis workers stay connected to the meaning of their own lived experience — not as something to hide, but as a source of wisdom, humility, resilience, and human connection?
Our Helper Resilience Hypothesis
As part of the presentation, we shared the Possible Always 988 Crisis Care Continuum Helper Resilience Hypothesis:
Being in touch with the meaning of our lived experience is the single greatest workforce protective factor.
When we are anchored in the meaning of our lived experience, we gain the capacity to hold space for another person. Through our presence, humility, emotional awareness, and compassion can emerge, creating the conditions for healing connection and hope.
Being fully present with people who are swimming in the pain of living inevitably brings up our own lived experiences. It changes us. This work stretches us, asking us to lean into discomfort, deepen our awareness, and grow in our understanding of ourselves as we support community members who may be thinking about suicide.
Every day, across 988 and the broader crisis care continuum, helpers choose to lean in. They choose vulnerability. They choose to trust the process. They choose to show up for their communities 24/7/365.
At Possible Always, we believe transformative individual and collective growth becomes possible when helpers are supported in staying connected to meaning, belonging, and one another.
