Offering hope: Nate Chute Foundation supports valley for 25 years

The Nate Chute Foundation has been providing the Flathead Valley with suicide prevention training and mental health support for 25 years.

Terry Chute and Jane Kollmeyer started the foundation in 1999 after their son Nate, a talented snowboarder, died of suicide at the age of 18. One of the most well-known winter events in Whitefish is the annual Nate Chute Classic, a banked slalom and boardercross competition, held last weekend at Whitefish Mountain Resort. 

“Nate's friends started this whole thing and they are now in their 40s and they’re scattered all over the country these days, but a group of them comes back every year,” Chute said. “Now, the majority of contestants are younger kids, kids that are in their teens and early 20s. So it's reaching a whole new group of young people, and that’s exciting.”

Chute said he and Kollmeyer thought the popular race might endure for a dozen years and peter out, but the longevity of the event is a testament to the community’s love for Nate and their support of the foundation. 

“We’re still getting tons of community support,” Chute said. “Support from Whitefish Mountain Resort has been fantastic through the years.”

Kacy Howard, a fourth-generation Whitefish resident, worked as the executive director of the Nate Chute Foundation for eight years. She still works for the foundation and is currently helping the leadership transition to the new executive director, Brad Ray.

Howard was a year behind Nate at Whitefish High School. She said while losing him was devastating and shocking, there was some community found amid the grief, and many of the old friends come together for the annual Nate Chute Classic.

“The contest is kind of like a family reunion in a lot of ways,” Howard said. “The contest is secondary to the connection that happens over this weekend.”

IN 2023, the Nate Chute Foundation, its staff of five and board of directors, provided an evidence-based suicide prevention curriculum to about 2,500 students in 15 schools across the Flathead Valley.

It offered teacher resilience training to 267 educators and school staff. The special training gives educators tools for supporting their own mental health and wellness, as well as their students’. 

In addition to its school-based programs, the foundation served about 1,000 adults with 42 community-based training sessions. Training and education is the core of what they do.

“We’ve always provided services either directly or by bringing in experts to provide seminars or training in the community,” Chute said. “We try to look at all aspects of it and listen to the community about what their needs are and look for opportunities to fill those needs.”

THE NOW well-established Nate Chute Foundation began as a mom and pop, kitchen table nonprofit with three to five people on the board.

Chute and Kollmeyer realized that since the need for suicide prevention services was not diminishing and the two of them were aging, they needed to take steps to bolster the organization. They hired an executive director and expanded the board so all aspects of the foundation would be managed.

In the early years of the foundation, many of its programs were focused on partnerships with school districts in the valley, and most of those programs were geared solely toward suicide prevention, using evidence-based methodologies. Howard said the traditional approach to suicide prevention has always been about risk factors and warning signs, and then intervention.

“We’ve tried, in the past year or two, to broaden our perspective a little bit. Instead of just being reactive to suicide prevention, we’ve taken a step into encouraging and promoting mental wellness along with reducing suicide,” Chute said. “They're two sides of the same coin.”

Now, Howard said, the foundation is more involved with hope, resilience and the new sciences around positive psychology. They seek to affect the suicide crisis and the mental heath issues that the country is experiencing in almost every age group and almost every demographic, from a more hope-based perspective.

“We’re giving people tools and resources and connection and understanding and breaking down those stigmas,” Howard added. “And approaching this as a human issue that we can get through, instead of letting it be such a scary or unapproachable topic.” 

She said mental health is something we all have to care for, just like our physical health, and that many mental illnesses can be prevented with skills and tools that we can use in our everyday lives.

“The other thing that’s cool about this shift to the resiliency skills, or coping skills is … an adolescent can look at those things, versus the risk factors and warning signs, and say, ‘I have some agency here. I have some choices here. I have something I can do,’” said Howard. 

The first tangible way the foundation has started to shift its programming to be more hope-based is by utilizing a project out of Missoula.

“We've started working with the University of Montana and one of the professors down there who's got a project called the Montana Happiness Project,” Chute said. “We’re working with him to incorporate pieces and parts of that into our trainings for local educators.”

One of the professor’s programs called “Happiness for Educators” teaches people how to incorporate wellness practices like gratitude into their lives to reduce stress, depression and increase resilience.

“We’re trying to bring in other partners, people who have got more training and more experience in that aspect than we do, and we’re always looking for the latest programs that are evidence-based that we can … provide to folks,” Chute said. “It’s been a good shift for us. It's not a major change, but it's a good shift.

CHUTE SAID determining the success of an organization that deals with medical and mental health issues is not as easy as counting widgets. The HIPAA law and privacy are important, so there are no hard numbers. 

He said after school presentations, the foundation collects exit ratings from students and faculty to get feedback on what they thought was good, what was important and what touched them. They also collect feedback from community groups and talk directly to the public.

“The snowboard competition … gives us a great opportunity to interact with a different audience … who are well aware of who we are and what we do, and get their feedback – personal conversations with people on what they think about how we’re operating in the community,” Chute said. “We’ve been operating here for 25 years and people feel pretty comfortable giving us feedback and telling us the effectiveness of [our work].”

The support of the community is also an indicator of the foundation’s success. Chute said the support they receive from the community continues to grow each year.

“Twenty-five years is a long time,” he said. “The support from the community has just been humbling, for sure.”

The Nate Chute Foundation works closely with several mental health professionals in the valley and it has a partnership with Logan Health. Additionally, they have a program development committee charged with keeping abreast of scientific studies about the causes of mental illness and new ways of dealing with the issue.

“We’ve got a group of people who provide these services day in and day out and we're always looking for and evaluating new ways of going at it,” Chute said. “So, who knows what’s around the corner?”

While the organization was founded in honor of Nate, Howard said it’s about so many other people, other families’ journeys and those who have experienced the struggle with suicidality personally.

‘This is not about Nate, it's about his parents saying, ‘We don't want this to happen to anybody else and how can we serve our community to offer something that helps?’” Howard said. “Terry and Jane … saw they had an opportunity, amidst all their grief, to do something for the greater good. This is about helping the whole community.”