Idea for research
Following the loss of Ben Raemers (a professional skateboarder) to suicide, the Ben Raemers Foundation was developed to maintain Ben’s legacy and help prevent anymore loss to suicide. Our aims are to enable the skateboarding community to have opportunities to develop the skills and tools needed to support each other to understand and address mental health. Suicide is a preventable death, so it’s something everyone can work together to do and save lives.
We provide a platform and safe spaces for for people to talk about mental health within the context of the skateboarding world. We consider ourselves to be breaking down fears, improving knowledge, and changing preconceptions and misgivings around mental health stigma and taboos. We want to evaluate the impact of our products, events, training, and media. We already have a well worked-out Theory Of Change for what we think we are doing in our work and this should provide a great place for students to think about applying their ideas and potentially co-designing something useful for us and academically important for the student and the research world.
We think the skateboarding community is an interesting context to consider suicide awareness-raising and prevention. We get to young people in a way other suicide prevention organisations may not and we contextualise everything in a shared common world and frame of reference - it just to happens to be skateboarding in this instance.
Impact of idea
This research would provide knowledge about the awareness of suicide, (this would be more quantitative research), as well as inform us how awareness through the Foundation impacts the skateboarding community (this would be more qualitative research e.g., focus groups, individual interviews).
