Holding collaboration together: a community response using a violence threat and suicide prevention protocol

Coordinated, multi-sectoral community responses to youth mental health represent a promising yet undertheorized approach to addressing the service fragmentation that characterizes collaborative work across education, health, policing, and community services. This article presents qualitative findings from a larger sequential mixed-methods study of Strathcona County's Violence, Trauma, and Suicide Prevention (VTSP) Protocol. The VTSP Protocol is a coordinated community framework designed to address youth mental health, community safety, and wellbeing in Alberta, Canada. The larger study combined social network analysis with qualitative inquiry; this article reports on the qualitative strand, which comprised 12 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders purposively sampled from across the VTSP network. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts identified four interwoven themes that together describe the relational, communicative, and capacity-building labours through which the protocol is sustained: leadership as relational infrastructure, shared processes and communication structures, cross-sectoral relationships and joint purpose, and capacity building and shared language. Across all four themes, collaboration emerged not as a stable institutional achievement but as a fragile accomplishment, strong yet precarious, requiring continual renewal rather than resting on structural stability. The findings are theoretically grounded in Ecological Systems Theory and Relational Coordination Theory. Implications for the design, sustainability, and transferability of coordinated community response models in other communities and school authorities are discussed.