Spot a fire? Need an ambulance? Witness a crime? Everyone knows the number to call during an emergency is 911. But what if what you really need is a hot meal, or help paying your utility bills?
That’s where Connect2Help211 comes in. The 24-hour helpline connects callers with services they need, mostly nonprofit agencies and programs. The line gets about 500,000 calls per year, but President and CEO Lynn Engel said she knows there are millions of people unaware of the services Connect2Help211 provides.
The Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper recently sat down with Engel to get the details about how calling 2-1-1 can connect central Indiana residents to help.
Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper: What is Connect2Help211?
Engel: We are an information and referral and crisis service. People call us, email us, get our directories, search on the website. They have something they need. That could be something very serious, like they don’t have any food, they don’t have a place to live, they need a job. It can be something important like, “We just moved here and I don’t know where my child goes to school.” Or, “I want to go to college, but I don’t have any money.” Or, “I want to donate or volunteer somewhere.” It can also be a crisis situation.
What do you mean by crisis?
Crisis situations can involve child abuse, elder abuse, suicide or homicide, and domestic abuse. It doesn’t mean one of those four things is always an acute crisis. Someone in a domestic abuse situation, maybe they’ve left their abuser and they’re in a shelter but they need some clothing, because they ran out in the middle of the night. They’re safe, but they still have things they need. Certainly anything can be a crisis for a caller. If you’re a mom with three kids and you don’t have anything to make for dinner that night, that’s a crisis for you. So it just kind of runs the gamut.
How can people reach you?
People can reach us in lots of different ways. They can dial 926-HELP, they can dial 1-800-SUICIDE and several other numbers. But the biggest and easiest way people get to us is by dialing 2-1-1. We’re also working on a texting service. I’m hoping for a first-of-the-year launch. Sometimes people will email and say, “Will you call me?” I don’t know why they do that, but they do. In that case, we’ll call them.
What happens when somebody calls you?
When someone calls in or emails us, they’ll talk to an extremely well trained professional specialist that’s had hundreds of hours of training. Basically, they’ll just talk about what’s going on. There’s very seldom one need. If somebody calls and says, “I don’t have any food,” there’s something else going on, and there’s something that has changed, because they had food last week or last month. So what’s happened?
We try really hard to not only help with what they need right that second. Not having enough food can be something like, “My daughter was sick last week, I had to stay home with her and I don’t get paid if I don’t work,” so we’re certainly going to get them some food, probably check to see if they have health insurance or if the child needs continuing care, maybe try to talk to them about finding a job where they get some benefits.
What are the most common types of calls you get?
Unfortunately, basic needs — food, utilities, housing, legal issues. Those types of things are generally difficult. We work from a housing-first perspective, meaning we want to make sure you have a place to live, because if you don’t, everything else is harder.
Right now, it’s starting to get cold so we’re getting thousands of calls from people who can’t pay their heating bill. Maybe it’s shut off because they didn’t pay the bill over the summer, or maybe they just got a big bill because they turned the heat on last month, or it could simply be that they know it’s going to be a big bill and they know there’s help out there.
Who are your callers?
Most of our callers are low income, but you certainly don’t have to be in a low-income situation to find yourself abused, or to have a teenage son who gets addicted to drugs. Money certainly helps, but it doesn’t always tell you where to go.
Do you find that the type and number of calls you get fluctuates based on what’s happening in the economy?
Absolutely it does, and the weather. I can tell you right now, we’re getting a lot of mental health calls, because of what happened in Paris. It could be not just mental health; it could be people who want to donate, people who want to help. And it’s starting to get chilly so the folks who’ve been sleeping on the street in the summer, they need to find a place inside. We’re getting calls for holiday assistance, people who want help getting the truck or the Barbie doll at Christmas. In January, we’ll start getting calls for people who need help paying or preparing their taxes. On March 15, the calls will skyrocket because the moratorium on the utilities is over. Then we’ll start getting the summer program calls. “Who can take care of my child in the summer? How can I feed my child in the summer?” Then we’ll start getting the, “My child needs a uniform to start school and I don’t have the money,” calls. It is extraordinarily cyclical.
For someone who’s calling for the first time … calling someone you don’t know can be really uncomfortable. What would you say to reassure those people?
That’s one of the reasons why the phone calls are so high, because there is kind of a safety net there. We do assure people’s privacy. You don’t have to give us your name; you don’t have to tell us where you live. We try to at least get a ZIP code, because you don’t want to send somebody to a food pantry that’s 20 miles away. But they can tell us anything, or they don’t have to tell us a thing. We don’t ask a question unless we need to know it.
If somebody’s homeless and needs shelter, we’ll do one of two things. We’ll always offer to find a bed for you, but some people would rather do it themselves. They’ll say, “Just give me the numbers, I’ll call them myself.” So they don’t want to give us any information, and we’re fine with that. But if they do want us to find a bed for them, then we need to ask how many are in your family, how many are children, how old are the children… so we can find an appropriate space for them.
How do you store callers’ information to keep it confidential?
We have a secure database, so anything they tell us goes in there. We will break confidentiality if someone calls and says for example, “I just got fired, and I’m going to go back to XYZ Company and blow up the building.” We’re not going to keep your confidentiality if you’ve made a specific threat.
We believe that if someone who’s suicidal calls us, that they want help. So we try very, very hard to build that rapport so they will share with us what we need to know. However, if someone is drunk and is sitting in the bedroom with a gun in their lap … if we get to the point where we think we’re not going to be able to de-escalate the situation, we will call for help. We try so hard not to do that, because they probably won’t call us again if we do that. But we will break that confidentiality if we feel that we have to to save their life. But we don’t have to very often. Usually our folks are so good they can de-escalate the situation.
What don’t you do? What are your limitations?
We can’t call someone else for you. If you call me and you say, “My mom cannot buy her prescriptions, she doesn’t have enough money. Can you call her and help her?” We can’t do that. We can tell you (the information to pass on), or we can say can you go over to your mom’s house and maybe you can call us together. That gets hard, because people don’t like that answer sometimes.
There have been a few times, usually in suicide situations, where, for example, “My sister just called and she sounds terrible. No, I won’t call the police on her.” So what we try to do is, “Let’s call her together.”
For more information on Connect2Help211, visit connect2help211.org.
