Are Nonprofit ‘Trusted Messengers’ More Important Than Ever? A Report From Rural America

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Galli Murray is the suicide-prevention coordinator for Clackamas County, Ore., which in recent years has seen a sharp rise in the number of people taking their life with a firearm. But she’s perhaps not the best person to explain the connection between firearms and suicide in the rural, mostly conservative parts of the county. A licensed social worker, Murray was born and raised in Seattle, lives in Portland, and identifies as queer. And she doesn’t own a gun.

Instead, Murray turned to Donna-Marie Drucker, founder of the Oregon Firearm Safety Coalition, as her ambassador to gun owners. Drucker is a passionate suicide-prevention advocate — she tried to kill herself when she was a teenager — but she also owns a firearm and is married to a combat veteran. “I knew for certain that I was not the right person to go to the gun clubs,” Murray says. “When Donna-Marie offered to work together, I snatched that up quickly.”

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Drucker is what nonprofits often like to call a “trusted messenger” — someone from within a community who has the connections and credibility to persuade individuals to embrace an idea or behavior that may seem foreign. She visits gun clubs throughout rural Oregon to talk about gun safety and distribute gun safes and locks paid for in part by Murray’s office. The strategy: In pro-gun, anti-government parts of the state, she’s a better bet than a health-agency expert to change hearts and minds.

Nonprofits have deployed trusted messengers for decades. They’ve encouraged skeptics to get breast-cancer screenings and Covid vaccinations. Paid mentors who’ve spent time in jail fare better with troubled youths than “even the best-intentioned social workers,” one study found.

Trusted messengers may be even more important — and their work perhaps even more challenging — during this time when Americans are increasingly polarized and walled off in ideological and socioeconomic silos. A 2022 study by the Ad Council Research Institute found that Republicans and people living in rural areas are far less likely than Democrats and urban residents to trust doctors, scientists, professors, and charities. Groups like Resetting the Table and Common Ground USA — which both tackle toxic polarization — lean on faith leaders and other respected community members to spearhead efforts to bring people together across political divides or differences in race, class, gender, and more.

Code for Gun Control

Academics, charities, and health experts seeking to address rural suicide know the value of the trusted messenger all too well. The people most at risk — rural gun owners and their families — are often wary of outsiders brandishing statistics and ideas for behavioral change.

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Drucker recently volunteered for a charity that operates Oregon’s suicide and crisis lifeline. She reviewed transcripts of a focus group of rural gun owners.

“What became very clear to me was that gun owners felt that suicide prevention was code for gun control,” says Drucker, who grew up in England and survived her teenage suicide attempt only because she couldn’t find her father’s guns.

“The messenger matters,” she adds. “I could say something, and gun owners might say ‘OK, I get it.’ A state employee could use exactly the same words, and it would not be trusted.”

For farmers and ranchers, the wariness is borne of experience. Academics and government employees often make unwelcome visits to observe environmental impacts or enforce regulations. Don McMoran, who runs a rural extension office at Washington State University, started a suicide-prevention program for farmers now used in 13 states.

Extension offices, which provide practical agricultural education, are one of the few units in academe that many ranchers and farmers trust. McMoran grew up on a farm that has been in his family for four generations. When he first got the extension job, he drove in a county car — and was surprised to see farmers and ranchers head to the back of their shops as he pulled up. Only when they realized he was with the extension office did they warm to him.

“We have a good working relationship with farmers,” McMoran says. “They generally know that extension is here to try to help.”

Philanthropy and Gun Safety

Increasingly, foundations and urban charities are turning to McMoran and others like him to take on the growing problem of suicide. Throughout the country, suicide rates have jumped by more than a third since 2000. In rural areas, they’re up nearly 50 percent. Experts say contributing factors include isolation, a lack of mental-health providers, financial pressures — and the prevalence of guns.

People in rural areas don’t attempt suicide at significantly higher rates than in cities or suburbs, but they’re more likely to use a gun. And guns are exponentially more lethal than the most common method for attempting suicide — a drug overdose.

Historically, foundations that support gun-violence prevention have tended to focus on more high-profile problems like urban homicides and mass shootings.

The Fund for a Safer Future — a 30-member funder coalition that has awarded more than $25 million to reduce gun violence and leveraged an additional $300 million — only recently began to address firearm-suicide prevention.

“It’s emblematic of a recognition in philanthropy that suicide — statistically, mathematically — is such a huge piece of the gun-violence problem,” says David Brotherton, the fund’s vice chair.

The least controversial work addressing rural suicide focuses on mental health. Farmers and ranchers often face financial pressures — stress compounded when they’re running a generations-old family operation. And thanks to the prized ethic of self-reliance in many rural communities, they are sometimes reluctant to seek help.

Foundations addressing mental health in rural areas include the Texoma Health Foundation, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, and the Helmsley Charitable Trust. Montana has created a campaign called Beyond the Weather, supported in part by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, to encourage conversations that reduce the stigma around mental illness.

(Note: The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

Work connecting guns and suicide is trickier.

Policy changes may be part of the answer. Twenty-one states have “red flag laws” that temporarily prohibit individuals who pose a danger to themselves or others from purchasing or possessing firearms. But many experts say community efforts to encourage voluntary safe storage of firearms work best.

“Guns are here to stay,” says Kurt Michael, a gun owner, suicidologist, and senior clinical director at the Jed Foundation. “If we’re ever going to put a dent in any of this, we have to put aside our philosophical differences, whatever they might be, and focus on the issue at hand, which is to prevent injury and death.”

Courtesy Donna-Marie Drucker

‘She’s Coming for My Guns’

Shortly after meeting Galli Murray, Donna-Marie Drucker was invited to address the board of the Douglas Ridge Rifle Club in a rural area in northwest Oregon. It didn’t start well. Drucker could read skepticism in the posture of the members and their uncomfortable looks: “She’s coming for my guns.”

She deflected the tension with humor. “Do I want your guns? Yes,” said Drucker. “Will my husband let me bring any more into the house? Probably not.”

“By the end of the presentation, the men in the room were like, what can we do? We have to stop this,” Drucker says.

Growing concern about rural suicide has led health experts throughout the country to dispatch trusted messengers to some very conservative regions.

Wyoming has one of the highest suicide rates in the country, and firearms are used in 75 percent of suicides, compared with just over half nationally. Last fall, Fremont Counseling Service, a nonprofit mental-health provider in the central part of the state, set out to meet gun owners on their own turf. It hosted a fundraiser, the Safe Shoot, at a shooting range in Shoshoni, Wyo., population 471.

The daylong event featured a competition with .22 rifles, and the top prizes were safes for pistols and guns. Members of the nonprofit’s board who had worked in law enforcement helped promote the event among gun owners. At the Safe Shoot, mental-health counselors talked about storing guns safely and giving them to trusted friends or family members during a crisis.

“Historically there’s been a huge chasm between the mental health groups and the suicide-prevention groups and the gun community,” Becky Parker, Fremont Counseling’s clinical director, said on a local podcast. “That’s not the way to fix this problem.”

The Ph.D. and the Rancher

The work of trusted messengers has limits. Health officials who try to bridge the divide on guns, for instance, can’t expect to be simpatico with their new partners on everything.

Allison Myers is associate dean for extension and engagement at Oregon State University. She has a Ph.D. in health behavior and once worked for Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat considered one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate — credentials unlikely to help cultivate relationships with rural gun owners.

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In working to address rural suicide, Myers learned about a national helpline with culturally competent counselors familiar with the stresses of farm and ranch life. She reached out to Todd Nash, a rancher in eastern Oregon who at the time was president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. With his help, she won state funding to bring the AgriStress Helpline to Oregon. The Roundhouse Foundation, an Oregon family foundation, also contributed funds.

Myers, who grew up in Virginia and knew nothing about ranching, traveled to Nash’s ranch to form a better working relationship. “Part of getting to know your partners is learning their disciplines just enough to be dangerous, which is why it was important for me to go check cows on horseback,” Myers says.

Nash and Myers talked about their collaboration at the Mental Health America conference in Washington, D.C., last September. Nash also twice had Myers on his podcast at the cattlemen’s association to discuss mental health.

But while happy to talk about mental health, Nash, who was elected to the state Senate in November, doesn’t acknowledge a connection to guns.

“People take their lives with lots of different vectors,” Nash says. “If we start attaching the gun issue to this issue, we’re not going to have a discussion after a while.”

‘Harvest Meals’

The Missouri Foundation for Health is among the biggest funders of firearm-suicide prevention, spending about $10 million, mostly in rural areas, since 2017. “Our grantees have found that they can’t lead with firearm suicide,” says Jessi LaRose, director of strategic initiatives. “It’s about leading people to come to that conclusion themselves.”

In Shelby County, Mo., population 6,000, 21 residents have committed suicide since 2011. The area lacks adequate mental-health counseling — until recently, residents had to drive 45 minutes to an hour to see a counselor in a program that often had a six- to eight-week waiting list.

Shelby County Cares opened in 2023, thanks to a $1.1 million, five-year grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health. The charity is led by two women, Lilly White and Jolie Foreman, married to men who run “century farms” — farms that have been in the same family for at least 100 years.

White is the county’s sole therapist. She and Foreman try to make inroads by hosting canning events and bringing meals to farmers as they work. In September, they took 100 “harvest meals” — pulled pork sandwiches, baked beans, a pickle, and cookies— to farmers working in the fields at dinnertime.

Those casual interactions, over time, can lead to conversations — including about reconsidering old traditions. Prior generations may have kept a loaded rifle by the back door for when varmints showed up. But is that convenience worth the risk of a readily accessible firearm today?

“Times have changed; society has changed,” White says. “What potentially could be the consequences?”

Foreman’s husband, Jarrell, who grows soybeans and corn, meets regularly with other local farmers in his second job as county director for the federal farm programs. Three members of his extended family have committed suicide. When Shelby County Cares holds events, he reaches out to contacts to encourage them to participate.

“Nobody is saying, ‘What the hell’s that all about?’’’ Foreman says. “Everybody knows we’re in a different world. This is a tough subject, but sometimes you have to talk about the tough things.”

Foundations need to commit to multiyear grant making because the work takes time, says LaRose of the Missouri Foundation for Health.

“It takes a while to figure out how to engage a community around this issue,” she says. “We’re starting to see people shift from, ‘Oh, no, we can’t talk about this in our community,’ to more increased receptivity as they build close relationships with gun owners.”

It’s not impossible for health officials without a trusted messenger to connect with rural residents. Language is key. Erin Borla, executive director of the Roundhouse Foundation, and host of the Funding Rural podcast, chose as her first guest a linguistic anthropologist who studies how people communicate with one another about divisive issues.

“So much of that urban/rural divide that we hear about is because we think we’re saying the same thing, but it’s being interpreted a different way,” says Borla, whose foundation is a member of Fund for a Safer Future.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Marino recently conducted a study of firearm owners in eastern Oregon as part of project on suicide prevention. The gun owners were initially “very distrustful” and believed that the university had an agenda, Marino said on Borla’s podcast.

She and her colleagues eventually won them over with open-ended questions. “We were asking people, ‘What does your firearm mean to you?’” Marino said. “‘How do you see community intervention and suicide-prevention strategies working in your community? What do you want to see?” The information the researchers collected helped inform recommendations for how health-care providers can discuss mental health and safe storage of firearms with their patients.

“A little bit of empathy, some understanding that cultural values can be different, and some awareness of the language you’re using goes a long way in breaking down what can be talked about as unbreachable barriers,” Marino said.

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