BY ADAM ATKINSON

North Country This Week

POTSDAM — A 24-hour call hotline which has helped St. Lawrence County residents in “at risk situations” for decades is rebuilding.

With smaller numbers of call center workers since the pandemic and decreased state funding, Reachout of St. Lawrence County is in the process of boosting its ranks of volunteers, and is accepting donations in the face of state funding decreases.

Executive Director Karen Butler Easter has worked as a hotline operator for decades, with much of that at Reachout which started in 1977. These days she still works shifts handling incoming calls at the Reachout offices housed in a residence purchased by the organization in Potsdam in 1989.

“I personally started working a hotline in Potsdam in 1971, my freshman year in Potsdam,” Easter said.

She said there were probably two reasons she began working at a help line.

“One, was that I had discovered a boy I loved in high school was gay, which was quite taboo then, and I didn’t know. I wasn’t really there to be a good friend to him and support him,” she said.

“And two, I realized that I had been a suicidal teenager but didn’t have words to express what I was going through,” Easter said.

“I’ve stayed here for 51 years,” she said. And for the last 44 years, Easter has served as the executive director of the hotline.

Easter said that during the Vietnam era hotlines started popping up in college towns often staffed by students trying to make a difference in people’s lives.

There were not a lot of places for people to turn to in those days if they were struggling with depression, abuse or other problems, but you could concentrate volunteers who are willing to listen into one place and collect information about services that might be available to help people, Easter said.

Reachout at (315) 265-2422 still provides a sympathetic ear and its volunteers maintain a comprehensive list of phone numbers and agency contacts to put people in touch with local services. “Our mission is to make it so nobody has to suffer alone,” said Easter.

Easter said the national hotline number for suicide prevention will dial people into an office in Syracuse. “However there are some things that we can do better than a service that’s two hours away,” Easter said.

Call volume

The organization takes thousands of calls in a year. Easter said many of the calls to Reachout are ripples from the pandemic.

“People’s lives have been disrupted horribly for the last 3 or 4 years,” she said. The lock down, combined with job losses and other stresses have led to many people needing help.

“That gets pretty intense. That just doesn’t end overnight,” she said.

Many of the calls fielded by Reachout volunteers deal with food insecurity, HEAP assistance, homelessness and calls for Renewal House and other agencies that Reachout serves as an answering service.

In addition to just being there for someone to talk to and provide connections to services, one key service offered by Reachout is a three-person mobile crisis team. The team, which includes a master’s level clinician, and trained counselors, can be deployed to help those in at risk situations anywhere in St. Lawrence County.

“We are passing five times as many situations onto the MCT right now than our historical average,” Easter said. “Some of them are people with longtime mental illness, but in our eyes it can be anyone.”

Easter said however, that aside from the situations dealt with by the MCT, about 80 percent of the people that call the hotline are going to get what they need just from talking to someone at Reachout. And, she said the organization historically ends up sending less people to the hospital than the national average.

Volunteers needed

When fully staffed the Reachout hotline will field between 30 and 70 call line volunteers and professional staff. But these days the organization is in the process of building its volunteer numbers back up from where they dropped when the pandemic hit.

“We lost a lot when COVID hit,” Easter said. “The majority of volunteers we have are mostly college students. We had a full roster, then COVID. Three days later we had three.”

The organization, like many, had to pivot and figure out how to continue to operate in a remote fashion during the pandemic.

“And those three did an awful lot… until they had to move away,” she said.

The pandemic also meant no regular three-month training classes for volunteers like there would be in normal times.

However, things are getting back on track for Reachout. A fresh class of volunteers just completed the training course held this spring and Easter plans to host another later this fall.

Trainings are usually held at the Presbyterian Church to start and then shift to the Reachout switchboard for some of it. Volunteering starts with filling out an application and then a selection process and interview.

“Rebuilding something like this has to be done in increments,” she said. In the meantime, former volunteers have stepped up to fill in the gaps in the call shifts she said.

Reachout staffs one volunteer for the overnight shift and two during the day along with paid staff.

Easter said people normally don’t work a hotline for too long and there is often a built in ending to the volunteering.

“You hear some pretty awful stories and deal with some pretty stressful situations,” she said.

But she said there are things people learn volunteering at a hotline they can’t learn anywhere else. Politeness, respect, and keeping an open heart while dealing with callers who may potentially be suicidal are some of those things.

“Every person that answers our phones should be prepared to answer a suicide call,” she said.

Finances

Local hotlines are often funded in large part as contract agencies by the state of New York and Reachout is no different.

However, the state is focusing a lot of its funding into the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and less into local call centers. And, in 2020 New York cut aid to contract agencies by 20 percent, Easter said.

So the organization is in need of donations and other financial support as well.

Changing of the guard?

After four decades guiding Reachout and its mission, Easter is looking at the future of the organization.

“The crisis services in this county are going to need someone else at the helm,” she said. “I’m hoping to get it to the point where I can have someone new at the helm.”

“But we are in a ‘one step at a time’ right now,” she said.

For information about Reachout and becoming a volunteer hotline operator, or to donate directly to the organization, visit http://www.reachouthotline.org/