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Partly Cloudy A crisis for the L.I. Crisis Center
Cuts could shut down 40-year-old call center
The Bellmore-based Long Island Crisis Center is facing a crisis of its own: Governor Cuomo’s proposed budget cuts mean that the center could lose nearly one-third of its budget, possibly shutting down its call center.
Part of the governor’s budget proposal calls for cuts to many social programs, including those that fund the Crisis Center. Many of the individual programs — like Youth Development and Delinquency Prevention and the Office of Children and Family Services — will be eliminated, and the funding will be consolidated into one block grant program.
“Our concern is that everything is going to go to essentially mandated services,” said Dorothy Jacobs, president of the Board of Directors of the Crisis Center. “It would eliminate services for mostly homeless and runaway youth, and that’s how our hotlines are funded.”
The Crisis Center, which is now in its 40th year, receives about 10,000 calls a year. It operates hotlines for runaways, suicide prevention, drug and alcohol addiction, and more. It has a staff of 170 volunteer phone operators, each of whom receives 250 hours of training over nine months.
Also part of the Crisis Center’s programs are outreach initiatives for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) youth, as well as an outreach program for homeless and runaway youth.
According to Andy Peters, the center’s associate executive director, the money for the outreach programs would remain largely intact, mainly because they are mostly federally funded. It’s the phone hotlines that would suffer.
“We have a strong commitment to what we do, obviously, but those programs, the hotlines, are heavily dependent on state dollars,” Peters said. “So there’s no way we could sustain the level of service we do now.” He added that the cuts could amount to $318,000 — a huge cut considering the yearly budget for the Crisis Center is just over $1 million, he said.
“We think it’s probably one of the best deals going,” said Jacobs. “That you can offer the services we do and it costs so little.”
