In early June, Michael Kitt and Jerome Osborn planted a row of signs in their front yard on C Street.
Your mistakes don’t define you.
You matter.
You are enough.
You are worthy of love.
Don’t give up.
Their neighbors noticed them and so did people passing on their way to the Sunken Gardens or strolling the Near South Neighborhood.
The signs started showing up in other places around Lincoln, too. On South 48th Street and Leighton Avenue and in the front yard of the Child Advocacy Center.
Osborn remembers one woman stopping and thanking them.
“She’d just had a hard day and she said, ‘This has really lifted me up,’” Osborn said Monday morning. “That’s the whole purpose of it.”
People are also reading…
The couple picked up the free suicide prevention signs after reading a Facebook post by Goldenrod Printing & Mailing.
“Basically, somebody shared a link to the originator of those signs,” said Frank Roark, whose wife, Jennie Kohl Roark, owns the business. “And we decided to print our own.”
They printed 30. “And that quickly turned into 250.”
The company’s union shop does all sorts of printing, Roark said. From business cards to banners to political signs. And sometimes they print signs with community-themed messages designed to inspire and bring people together.
Like: “Keep Hate Out of Our State” and “Hate Has No Home Here” and “You Are Beautiful.”
Often they give them away.
That’s what they did with these signs, too.
“The anti-suicide message, that’s an important one to us,” Roark said. “When we do this stuff, all I really ask for in payment is send us a picture of it and we post it on Facebook.”
A photo of Stacy Griffin's front yard sign -- Don't Give Up -- is on the printing shop's page and on her own.
She'd lost her best friend, Coby Mach, to suicide this spring, she said, and when she heard about the signs, she knew she wanted one.
"I've had cousins commit suicide, I've had my best friend commit suicide, I'm not immune to (the effects) of suicide."
Griffin, owner of Petal Creations, had hoped to help underwrite the cost of more signs to distribute around the city.
The messages are not trademarked, but when Roark reached out to the nonprofit in Oregon that came up with the campaign in 2017, the group respectfully requested they don’t print more.
“But they gave us permission to distribute the ones we had already made,” he said.
And it feels good to see them -- and their affirming messages -- on the streets.
“We do a lot of political signs and it’s nice to see them around town, but it doesn’t even compare to this stuff.”
And at a time when the national suicide rate is rising -- from 10.5 per 100,000 in 1999 to 14 in 2017 -- it feels necessary, too.
A small way to remind people that they matter, Osborn said.
“It’s sad that someone feels that horrible,” Kitt said. “We need to open the dialogue up.”