First Call for Help 

The Job

I needed a job. It’s not that I didn’t already have a job. I did. In fact, I had two jobs. I was a fire-rescue dispatcher with Sarasota County, and I was a volunteer with the Guardian ad Litem Program. The latter job didn’t pay anything, however, and the former didn’t pay nearly enough. Some extra expenses with the house along with the normal expenses of three children meant that my wife and I could use a little bit more coming into the household general budget.

I saw the part-time job advertised in the paper. I didn’t know what an information and referral specialist was or did, but the fact that the job was in Venice and not Sarasota appealed to me. I sent in my application, got called for an interview with the organization’s director at the primary office in Sarasota, got called for a follow-up interview with the director and the Venice office manager at the office in Venice, then I was offered the job. I would be an Information & Referral Specialist with First Call for Help of the United Way of Sarasota County.

First Call for Help is not a United Way agency. It is part of the United Way organization itself. It is United Way’s social service referral and case management agency.

Information & Referral

Information. The word is everywhere. Information management. Information superhighway--don’t worry, that’s the first and last time you’ll hear me say that phrase. Information services. I’ve heard it said that we are living in the information age. What do people who say that really mean? Do they mean that we have more and more information around? Certainly, I think that we do, but I think they mean more than that. I think they mean that our individual relationship with information has changed.

We see this on a personal level everyday. No longer do we walk into a grocery store and pick up a can of peas and look for the price that has been stamped on the can. No, we look at a label because the price for that can will be computed when the clerk runs the bar code over a scanner at the checkout and a computer that probably isn’t even within a hundred miles of the store tells the register what to charge you for that can.

When I went through college as an undergraduate, I majored in philosophy and minored in political science. I wrote a lot of papers. All those papers occupy a file at my house that is several inches thick. When I attended paralegal school, I, also, wrote a lot of papers. All those papers are saved on a floppy disc that fits in my shirt pocket.

If I decided I wanted to help my kids out with their school work and buy them an encyclopedia for home use, I have a couple choices open to me. I can spend several hundred dollars on a multivolume group of books that will take up 2 or more shelves on the bookcase at home; or, I can spend well less than a hundred dollars and get the same information on a couple of CDs.

So what’s all this got to do with First Call for Help or with United Way? Well, consider, if you will, these three people. First is a young man, he just turned eighteen last week, he is going to school, and he has a part-time job when he’s not at school. He comes home after school one afternoon, expecting to change clothes and head off to work. Instead, he finds his clothes all packed up and his father adamant about wanting his key to the front door returned to him. You’re 18 now, I don’t need to support you, go get a place of your own, his father tells him. This boy has four immediate problems: he needs an immediate short-term place to live, he needs a long-term place to live, he needs food, and he needs transportation so he can keep going to school and get to and from work.

The second person to whom I invite your attention is a young woman living in an apartment in Venice with her three preschool-aged children. She stays home and watches the kids and her husband works full-time on a construction site. Neither of them speaks English very well. They are struggling, but they are making it. The rent is due today; and they have received a shut off notice on the electric bill, and there isn’t a whole lot of food in the house, but today is payday and that will all get straightened out. Except, it doesn’t. The young husband is tired of working long hours and having nothing of his paycheck left. He’s tired of the crying kids. He’s tired of being married. He cashes his check, packs his clothes, and leaves. The young mother is scared and confused. She knows there is a place out there called H.R.S. that helps people who need help, so she looks in the phone book under the H’s. It’s not there, of course. Even when that was the name of the agency, it wasn’t listened in the phone book under its initials, and that’s not even what the agency is called anymore.

She’s got immediate problems. She needs food for her kids. She needs to get the rent paid. She needs to find a job and child care. She needs to keep from having her electric power shut off.

Finally, consider, if you will, a woman and her husband. They moved to Florida after he retired, bought a small but comfortable house in South Venice, and enjoyed their new lives as retired grandparents. They had been down here only 2 years when he died. It was hard, but she adjusted and pressed on. Then, one day out of the blue, her adult daughter shows up with her two children. Bad news. The children’s father has left them. He’s a crack addict. He’s living on the street somewhere and is being treated for full-blown AIDS. She’s been tested and is HIV positive, she needs to go into a drug rehab program herself, and she’s dropping of the two kids while she enters an 18-month program. The grandmother can either keep her two grandchildren or they can be placed in foster care. Her decision.

This woman, who has already raised her own children, must now face the prospect of raising two small children without the help of her husband. These children need to be tested for HIV, they need to be registered for school, she needs to arrange for some kind of financial assistance, she will need to get a job to support her grandchildren.

All three of these people have different problems, but they all have one thing in common. They need information. They need to know what their options are. They need to know what resources, private and public, are out there to get them through this time in their lives.

That’s where I think those who say we live in the information age are no longer accurate. There is plenty of information out there, but these people don’t need all the information in the world. They need the information that will help them address what they need to do now. No, we are no longer in the information age. We have moved on to the next stage; we are now in the age of communications. That’s the referral part of information and referral. We communicate the available and pertinent information to those who need that information.

And just for the record, I did not make up those three examples. Those were all clients that I encountered my first week working with First Call for Help.

Matching People with Services

Have you ever needed information or help with a problem but had no idea where to turn? Who hasn’t. As our world grows more complicated and many would say more chaotic, modern challenges can sometimes overwhelm an individual or a family. Fortunately, Sarasota County residents have somewhere to turn. Making sense of the myriad community resources available to members of the local community is what First Call for Help does.

The Venice office served as the one-stop information and referral service for residents of south Sarasota County. We served the communities of Englewood, Laurel, Nokomis, North Port, Osprey, and Venice. We were familiar with the programs available in our community and could guide individuals and organizations through the maze of services to respond to individual needs. We provided an explanation of the community resource structure, enabling our clients to proceed with a sense of understanding and confidence when dealing with resource agencies.

These were very real problems our callers presented us with. By properly assessing a client’s circumstances and making the appropriate referral, we could make the difference:

We would work on behalf of our clients providing advocacy services when necessary. We would call other agencies, companies, or individuals on behalf of our clients in the attempt to obtain the necessary services.

Direct Services for Clients

Upon demonstrated need, we provided vouchers for food, for gasoline, for transportation. We provided a kit of hygiene products for people who were newly employed but had not yet received their first pay check. These were items that could not be obtained with food stamps, such as shampoo, deodorant, bath soap, shaving cream, razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, and even laundry detergent. We provided diapers for people who could not afford them.

Most of these resources were donated to us. The money to help people buy gasoline in order to keep medical and social service appointments as well as to get to and from work came from the people who cleaned our office on the weekend. Each donated half their salary to enable us to do this for our clients.

We also had a fund available to us that would help people one time with financial assistance when no other program would help. It was administered through the Community Foundation of Sarasota County and was called the Kalish Helping Hand Fund. This was a truly great resource and was available only because of the generosity of the couple who endowed the fund. I personally handled the applications for this money that were sent in by the Venice office. I was able to help a widow with her property tax. We helped a recently widowed mother of two who had gone out and gotten two jobs after her husband died but who did not have enough money on hand to make the car payment. We helped people unable to work because of illness with rent. We helped people purchase special medical equipment that medicaid would not cover.

Volunteer Staff

When I was first hired at First Call for Help, there were two part-time staff people in the office and a half dozen volunteers. Within a few months, the other staff person left to join another local community organization. That left me as the only staff employee. The office would have closed right then and there without the volunteers.

I worked with a great group of volunteers, almost all of whom had been with First Call for Help longer than I had. They were incredible. They shared their skills and used the office’s resources to develop new skills. The volunteers worked directly with the office’s clients, both on the phone and in person. The ultimate goal of the office’s volunteers was to help effect a positive and substantive change whenever possible in the lives of our clients through appropriate referrals to community resources. Our volunteers liked to work with people and help people find solutions to their problems. They really made these things happen for our clients.

My Staff Duties

Besides case management and doing the Kalish Fund applications, I also helped maintain the automated database of community resources that we consulted when making referrals. This involved contacting each agency on a regular basis to make certain that their programs were still available and that our information was current and accurate. I provided all administrative support for the Venice office, prepared demographic reports providing a detailed statistical summary of the groups of people seeking our help, did data entry, prepared office correspondence, prepared and conducted presentations to social service agencies and organizations, helped keep the office’s personal computers and network connections working, and, of course, I trained and supervised the volunteers.

It was a good job. I had good people with whom I was working. The staff at the main office in Sarasota provided me all the support they could. The volunteers at the Venice office were first rate. The case managers at the other agencies with whom I dealt always welcomed my calls, whether I was seeking information or seeking help for a client. More mundanely, I had a nice office on the second floor of an office plaza in downtown Venice. It had a window from which I could see the draw bridge as it opened and closed for boat traffic on the Intracoastal Waterway. I decorated the office with some awards and letters of commendation and with some artwork that my wife had done. I received many compliments on the way I decorated not only my office but the lobby and hallway, also.

I put in a lot of hours, but it really was a good job and I hope I managed to help a number of people along the way. I believe we as an organization did exactly that.

Of course, all good things eventually end. After 18 months, funding priorities shifted and United Way made the necessary decision to close the Venice satellite office and relocate its functions to the main office in Sarasota.

The Office Closes

First Call for Help opened its branch office in South Sarasota County in May 1994. United Way of Sarasota County did this in response to the COMPASS Needs Assessment, which recommended that it do so to address the information and referral needs of South County residents. The Human Services Planning Association, in its Connections ‘96 and ‘97 reports, confirmed the continuing need.

The need is a simple one. People can’t get help if they don’t know where to find help. There is help of all sorts in South County. Unfortunately, that help is provided by several agencies operating numerous programs at many locations. Fragmented social service resources make it difficult to find the right help from the right agency.

We in the Venice office met with notable success. Through the end of September 1997, the Venice office processed 2,195 calls. That averages out to about 392 calls a month compared with the 171 calls the office processed in May 1994, its first month of operation. We’ve saw our share of calls between the two offices grow from 10 percent to 30 percent, and we saw it hold steady with about a third of all calls between the two offices coming from South County. That is certainly a validation of the assessment made by both COMPASS and the Human Services Planning Association.

Of course, success in a particular endeavor is only one factor that must be considered in organizational management and planning. Funding cuts prompted United Way’s Board of Directors to streamline operations and consolidate First Call for Help’s two offices. The Venice office closed its doors at 12:30 on Friday afternoon, October 31, 1997.


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