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twitter‘Desperate’ Nevadans flooding help line
It’s another result of a crippling recession: More are needy
Steve Marcus
Giselle Sanchez, center, Carolyn Graham, left, and Belinda Brooks are among 13 operators statewide who field calls to Nevada’s 2-1-1 help line, which tries to match people in need with public services.
Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Nevada 2-1-1 manager Carol Filburn says increased call volume and emotions have affected her staff. "They would listen to crying all day and then they would come into my office crying," she said.
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Beyond the Sun
- Nevada Department of Health and Human Services: Nevada 2-1-1
She can feel what the callers on the other end of the line are feeling. Recently it’s been tearing, gripping, throat-tightening.
Giselle Sanchez and 12 other call center operators spend all day answering questions about where to find help. Sometimes it’s help with the rent. Other times it’s help steering away from suicide.
These call-takers are the backbone of Nevada 2-1-1, a toll-free information service that United Way runs here and in 45 other states. Callers to the number in Nevada reach a portal for more than 7,000 social services available statewide.
Since the economy tanked, more Nevadans than ever are dialing the number, and they are more eager for help, Sanchez and her colleagues said. As of Tuesday, the count was more than 6,000 in each of the past five months, a first for the 4-year-old program. And since 2007, when the recession began, the average number of monthly calls has increased 22 percent.
News accounts suggest it’s a trend being seen across the country, at 2-1-1 programs from Palm Beach, Fla., to Orange County, Calif.
“People are desperate,” said Mary Liveratti, who oversees the program for the state, the source of most of the program’s funding. “They are looking for help meeting basic needs, like food, clothes, a place to live.”
They are also pleading for information about finding work and avoiding foreclosure, said Carol Filburn, who manages the program’s day-to-day affairs at HELP of Southern Nevada, where nine of the state’s operators work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. Operators in Reno answer calls from 4 p.m. to midnight and from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends. They all have access to the same database, the source of their referrals.
Filburn said the increased volume — and emotions — have taken their toll on the Southern Nevada call-takers in recent months.
“They would listen to crying all day and then they would come into my office crying,” she said. The director decided to bring in a counselor for monthly meetings with the operators.
Sanchez, who sits in a tight room with five chairs, computers and phones, needed to put a recent call on hold while she cleared tears from her cheek and the lump in her throat. The woman on the other end was, like her, a mother of three. The caller had lost her job. She had lost her husband, after he lost his job in construction and left the house. The caller then lost her house.
“I’ve been a bad mother,” she told Sanchez, asking whether there was an agency that could take care of her three little girls. Sanchez put her on hold, recovered her wits, and told the woman, “I know how you feel. But there are other alternatives.” She gave the woman information about sources of help with her financial free-fall.
The call center operator’s eyes teared up as she recounted the conversation.
Sitting nearby, colleague Belinda Brooks said some people call and say they can’t believe they’re even asking for help, because they’ve always been among the well-off. Sanchez has gotten calls from people who, in past years, donated to the same sorts of organizations from which they now seek assistance.
Both mentioned that the desperation they feel from callers is often compounded by the frustration of having to tell them that no help is available, say, for the rent, because a program’s funding has run out.
The 2-1-1 staff attempts to find out which programs are working well. They call 3 percent of their callers back within three weeks, to find out whether the information offered to them was useful. About one in four say yes. There is no detailed information about why the rest say no, but Filburn figures that one reason may be that many callers wind up being ineligible for the services they seek. She said her staff also attempts to update its database constantly, based on research into new programs and updates from callers about changes in existing ones.
Liveratti would like for the program to have more funding, of course, to hire more operators and to do more research. She said the program staff may not always have time to keep up with information such as new programs coming out of stimulus funding. She admitted that the program didn’t know to inform callers about the recent weekend visit of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a nonprofit organization on a national tour. The organization helped some 40,000 Nevadans modify their mortgages in a three-day period.
But even while need is greater, the program has suffered funding cuts. In the same period that its caseload has exploded, the annual budget has dropped from $643,622 for the 2007-2008 fiscal year to $583,266 for the current year.
Meanwhile, 2-1-1’s operators continue to try to guide Nevada’s unhinged and often hopeless to some kind of help. And Filburn tries to maintain staff morale, even when they have no answers.
“Sometimes,” she said, “you have nothing to give.”
Discussion: 19 comments so far…
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how'd that 8 years of rich people using that sucking sound on all the money work out for you. good old christians will be out there bashing the needy. idiots kissing the masters feet.
Overpopulation problems here have their disadvantages..
I'm just glad 211 helps people. It is better than the old system of looking things up yourself and getting disconnected lines.
Things were pretty good until dumbocrats took over congress three years ago and actively cheered recession as a means to lower the carbon footprint.
Republican Greenspan lowers the fed funds rate to 1 per cent in 2001 and sowed the seeds for asset inflation for which we will pay for a long time to come.
People, forget 211, sell what ever you own and get the heck out of town (camp out on Santa Monica Beach, CA)! The homeless shelters are HORRIFYING; just walking in a homeless shelter gets you labeled mentally ill/addicted/alcoholic FOR LIFE in your medical records; good luck ever getting an apartment or getting hired with those in your records!
Comment removed by staff.
Maybe Steve Wynn could donate some of the money he spends for face lifts and give the food the rich don`t eat before they throw it in the dumpsters.
Then maybe again he could just publish the location of the dumpsters and wrap the food so folks can take it home.
I just called 211, AND THEY HAVE NO HOUSING, NO TRAINING, and NO JOBS!
rusty, your ideas are like your sign in name.
Maybe Steve Wynn should employee people, which he does. Maybe he should hire more people to work to get their own food. He is hiring about 100 people at Wynn alone, not including Encore.
https://wynn.recruitmax.com/ENG/Candidat...
There are jobs out there, but since they pay less then what people are making on unemployment, why work. Look at any casino companies website and you will see they are hiring. Once unemployment benifits run out, people will go back into the workforce, causing unemployment to go down.
my nephew, a mortgage broker working for di-
tech, was making a bundle.
every time i saw him he had a new car...
mercedes, hummers, lexus, all bought on the
credit card.
i said: " jeffrey, you'd better save some money.
this won't last forever."
well, he didn't and now it's all over for him.
house, children's education, cars...all over.
I hear the flood control tunnels are at 100% occupancy.
I thought Obama was going to pay my mortgage, buy my gas and I voted for him.He said, vote for change and I did. Now all I have is the change in my pocket, at least this week
Get some new material, marcus
Democrats caused this problem? Took over Congress 3 years ago? Wow, are you misinformed, no maybe not misinformed--I'm thinking just plain ignorant! I'm thinking this all started almost ten years ago when an Idiot from Texas stole his second term as President, gave the tax breaks to the very rich, started two wars and had his counterparts in Congress passed trade legislation that made exporting our manufacturing base to third world countries legal. You wanna cry and wine about policy? Try calling Gov. Gibbons office and telling him to release the Stimulus monies so some of these projects in NV that are waiting for them can get going...
Right on, pesos. I highly recommend two videos. One is a NY Times item about teenage runaways squatting in foreclosed houses and sleeping next to the freeway and the other is a new pbs documentary about the Crash of 1929.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperien...
A bunch of people need to leave the state, then the social services will not be so overtaxed.
I DONT SEE NOT ONE OF THOSE FAT CATS SITTING IN WASHINGTON SWEATING THEIR HOUSE PAYMENTS,OR THE FOOD ON THE TABLE!!! How the words to the Declaration are ringing louder and louder.It may be time for atleast one of the quoates to be repeated???