One year after professional exchange experience, Muckey reflects on its impact

In November 2023, Lost&Found CEO Erik Muckey spent 10 days in southeast Asia representing our mission as part of the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Professional Fellows reciprocal exchange program, supported by the United States Department of State.

He shares his reflections on the importance of that trip for Lost&Found and the state of South Dakota—and what’s happened since.

 

In November 2023, I experienced Thanksgiving in a way I would have never dreamed of—eating dim sum (a traditional Chinese meal of small plates of food, typically during brunch hours) at a shopping mall in the city center of Kuala Lumpur. Far from home, my new friends and professional colleagues, Fariza and Sean, asked me about the Thanksgiving traditions of my home. We shared what we were grateful for in our lives and what we hoped for in the year ahead, as if we had known each other our entire lives.

The meal followed a day of touring Ipoh, a tin boom town in the Malaysian state of Perak on the edge of the Cameron Highlands, and more than a week’s worth of touring, presentations, meetings with local and national leaders, and absorbing the incredibly hospitable and diverse cultures that make up Indonesia and Malaysia.

So, how did a guy who grew up in rural South Dakota end up there?

Because of the United States Department of State’s Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Professional Fellows program.

Earlier in 2023, I was contacted by an adviser and friend from the University of South Dakota trying to place fellows between the ages of 25-35 through the YSEALI program. Lost&Found was given the opportunity to host two professionals working in suicide prevention and mental health. Of the 30 professionals placed around the country, five arrived in Sioux Falls in May 2023.

Not knowing much about the program but seeing the impressive skillsets of the incoming fellows, I jumped on the opportunity to host YSEALI fellows at Lost&Found. We were fortunate to host Benny Prawira, an independent psychological researcher from Indonesia who founded and led an organization like Lost&Found called Into the Light, along with Sean Thum, a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry and a policy officer with the Malaysian Health Coalition.

For three weeks, Benny and Sean joined our team in Sioux Falls, working alongside colleagues in areas spanning campus peer mental health support to program evaluation to community education to suicide loss survivor support, embedding themselves in the daily life and work of Lost&Found. Not only did they get a full South Dakota experience—from the Falls of the Big Sioux all the way to the Black Hills—they became core members of our team.

In just three weeks’ time, Benny and Sean helped our team revamp Lost&Found’s mental health and loss survivor education materials, contributed to the meaningful research of the Inclusive Care Collaborative, connected with professionals across South Dakota, and shared their deep knowledge and understanding of the suicide prevention field.

Simply put, they made our organization better at its mission. And even better, we continue to work with them, more than a year later.

Through the YSEALI exchange, Benny and Sean got to know the United States—starting in Missoula, MT—and finished their time getting a glimpse into how civic engagement plays a critical role in the policymaking and administrative processes of Washington, DC.

The success story could end there, but it didn’t. At the end of their time in the United States, fellows can apply to have their hosts fly across the world to Southeast Asia to experience a similar exchange. Highly competitive, less than 20% of the applicants were said to be selected. Easy to write off, right?

Wrong. Months later, I received an email from the State Department—you’re going to Indonesia and Malaysia in the next three weeks.

And what an experience it was. Benny and the Into the Light team welcomed me to Jakarta, Indonesia for a day of touring and the opportunity to present Lost&Found’s resilience and suicide prevention work to more than 800 live and remote attendees at the US Embassy’s @America cultural center.

The next day, I flew to Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia and spent nine days in the country, connecting with local and national suicide prevention and policy leaders and speaking to more than 1,000 medical students in training in KL. Immersed in a beautiful, colorful, and tropical city and region, I met peers leading organizations and movements to improve mental health education and suicide prevention. We exchanged ideas that worked, shared common challenges, and found meaningful ways to collaborate. Most of all, we found ways to share our work in our respective countries—because the contexts were not so different.

The YSEALI Professional Fellows exchange program was a magnificent experience filled with learning, new language and culture, and foundations for long-term partnership between professionals in the United States and Southeast Asia that changed Lost&Found for good, forever. Here are four key ways it affected our organization:

• It made us aware of common challenges. Reducing the stigma surrounding mental health and suicide is just as much of a challenge in rural Indonesia and Malaysia as it is in South Dakota. Knowing we aren’t alone—even across the world—makes hard work less challenging to bear.
• It brought new expertise and perspectives. Benny and Sean have led the way in their respective nations to elevate knowledge and understanding of suicide risk and prevention. They also brought specific technical expertise—Benny in research and Sean in medical psychiatry—that we didn’t have on our team and benefited from learning.
• It gave us new learning and experiences that could be applied at home. From, quite literally, the opposite side of the globe, Benny and Sean gave Lost&Found new language and tools that we could apply that we hadn’t thought of before. Likewise, the highly innovative and data-driven programs that Lost&Found delivers were put to the test on the international stage.
• It brought us new, long-term partnerships. Throughout the exchange, YSEALI Fellows and our Lost&Found team found common connections that could advance the mission of suicide prevention, wherever we served. We continue our work together and are finding ways to share programs and expertise—with many new innovations and developments in the field of suicide prevention to come.

When we think of foreign affairs or diplomacy, we often think of what our country does to prevent war (or stop it). What we experienced just over a year ago shows that “foreign affairs” also means connecting a South Dakota-based suicide prevention nonprofit with two outstanding professionals from Southeast Asia and finding mutual benefit and resource sharing.

Lost&Found and the four other Sioux Falls nonprofits who hosted YSEALI fellows learned just how important international knowledge exchange can be to improve our practices and make us more effective for the people we serve here in South Dakota.

It’s essential we continue to elevate and support our state by building expertise and skills, whether nationally or abroad. This is just one way that Lost&Found is doing more to prevent suicide and will continue to for years to come.

And we couldn’t be more grateful for our new colleagues and friends working on the same goal across the globe.