LOGAN — September is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month and a concert featuring singer Alex Boye this week will bring more awareness to the problem.
On KVNU’s For the People program on Monday, Cache County Executive David Zook talked about how the county got involved.
“And that’s what happened in this case….Margaret (Gittins)works for me, she’s one of our county employees. We have an incredible team there at the county, great people, and she’s an example of the kind of people we have. She felt this need, she saw this need and we had done some things in the community throughout the year, but she saw something that was happening in some other communities and said ‘we could do that here, we should do that here, let’s do it here!’ And she just jumped on it,” he explained.
Margaret Gittins works part-time for the county and reached out to Boye after seeing a message from a follower about a similar concert the singer had been involved with in Herriman.
She said she thought about it after learning about some recent local suicides.
“And so I reached out to Alex Boye via social media and he responded to me. Everything just fell into place from there which is also to me a testament that this event needs to happen, it’s supposed to happen. And community support has not lacked in trying to pull off something this big in two and a half weeks,” said Gittins.
The concert, which is Thursday evening at 6p.m. at the Cache County Fairgrounds is free but donations will be taken for the Cache County Suicide Prevention Coalition.
Zook said also that a well-known Utah company will match any donations that come into the coalition.
“I just got a text message while we were on the air here from Margaret. She said DoTERRA just offered that they will match any donations that come in – in the next 48 hours. People can donate through the DoTERRA Healing Hands-dot-org website.”
He said there will be about two dozen exhibitor booths providing resources and information.
Also there will be a special event for First Responders, who many times have to experience first-hand the trauma of a suicide. This event featuring Boye will be a private event the night before on Wednesday.
“So if first responders want to come to this, we’re doing an event(and) we’re going to talk a little bit about some healing and some things that will hopefully be helpful to them. We’re going to have Alex there, we’re going to have some goodies there and we’re going to express our gratitude to them for helping with this epidemic.”
Zook said all the responder agencies have heard about it and if any have not, they can contact their supervisors for more information.