By:Cindy J. Roth
The Long Island Crisis Center in Bellmore, a non-profit group committed to providing suicide-prevention, crisis-intervention, counseling and information services to Long Island residents, celebrated its 30th anniversary June 15. The grassroots organization, started by Adelphi University students as a "bad-trip hotline," continues to expand despite drops in volunteerism and funding.
Opening under the name Middle Earth, from the book "Lord of the Rings" meaning a safe place for young people, the hotline's focus in 1971 was on students experiencing problems with alienation and drugs. The hotline still provides free, confidential anonymous counseling 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In 1972, the Middle Earth project received funding from the Nassau County Youth Board to expand its services to all Nassau youths. As social trends and changes emerged in the 1970s, so did Middle Earth's services. A program called The Great Cultural Conspiracy was developed to provide social activities and performance space for theater-arts projects. Aiding the homeless also became a big undertaking for Middle Earth. The organization was one of the first to do crashing; that is, providing housing for the homeless, said Linda Leonard, the crisis center's executive director, who has been with LICC since 1975. Everyone was guaranteed housing for one night. Most were runaway youths, but no one was turned away.
"We were in this house in Hempstead with dilapidated beds," Leonard said. "Sometimes, the sheets weren't even changed before the next person would sleep in them."
In 1978, Middle Earth stopped housing because it became a tremendous drain for the organization, but a 24-hour intake for runaway youth was still honored. Also in the 1970s, Middle Earth established the first free sexuality-counseling programs for men and women, and in 1979, the group moved to its current home in Bellmore.
Groundbreaking programs that started in the 1980s included a runaway hotline and an adolescent-depression and suicide-prevention program for high schools. The runaway hotline is still available for homeless, abused and maltreated youths and their families. Trained counselors provide crisis counseling and emergency-housing assistance. The depression and suicide-prevention program allows LICC to go into high schools across Long Island and talk to teenagers about picking up on their friends' hints about depression and possible suicide.
Paula Grenot, LICC's assistant director, said the organization stresses that young adults usually mention to a friend if they are seriously considering suicide. Grenot emphasizes that, while students are afraid of telling someone about a friend's possible suicide attempt and risking hurting the friendship, students are better off spending the rest of their lives trying to repair a broken friendship than mourning one.
In the 1990s, Middle Earth changed its name to LICC, and sexuality emerged as a huge topic to tackle. With funding from The Paul Rapoport Foundation, a New York City-based foundation set up after a gay political leader's death, provided funding for LICC's Pride for Youth program. Pride for Youth provides education, outreach and supportive services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth and their families. Now primarily funded through the New York State Department of Health, the program hired a full-time staff and set up a coffeehouse.
The coffeehouse, located just down Bellmore Avenue from the Crisis Center, provides a safe, friendly, non-alcoholic space where homosexual youths can socialize and participate in counseling every Friday, 7:30-11:30 p.m.
Pride for Youth received a second government grant a year later, allowing it to grow larger in size and staff. Pride for Youth sees more than 800 clients annually and has educated over 2,500 students and adults through community-education programs.
Keeping with the times, LICC started one of the country's first Internet counseling programs in 1998. Troubled youths can now sign online and talk via instant messenger with a volunteer, 2-11 p.m., seven days a week.
"[The Internet counseling program] offers kids a way to communicate in a way they know," Fran Turtle, LICC program coordinator, said. "In their heads, it's a higher level of anonymity."
The Safe Haven program was started last summer after a New York State law was passed permitting the anonymous surrender of a newborn within five days of birth to a safe environment without interrogation or prosecution. Because of the law, LICC joined with national organization Children of Hope to create a 24-hour, seven-day toll-free hotline to prevent abandonment of newborns.
On top of the array of hotlines and supportive, sexual-identity counseling groups, LICC also offers many community-based educational programs like homophobia prevention and building self-esteem.
Subhead: Giving support, but little in return
"[The hardest thing about the job is] is having to lay off people," Leonard said. "It's a constant struggle how we are going to pay the bills. The staff is underpaid, and we lose good people."
Funding continues to be an underlying problem for the LICC. The Nassau County Youth Board provides LICC's bread and butter, but in December 1999, county Executive Thomas Gulotta (R-North Merrick) cut Youth Board funding by 50 percent, directly hurting LICC. With petitions, demonstrations and rallies, the Youth Board's funding was later reduced to a 20-percent cut. Before 1999, LICC's allocation from the Youth Board was about $300,000, and since, it was reduced by 23 percent to about $230,000, according to Grenot.
The cuts eliminated most of the community-education programs LICC once celebrated and many clerical and administrative positions. Leonard said it got to the point when LICC was asking volunteers to bring in toilet paper because they had no money to buy any.
The Nassau County Youth Board is not LICC's soul source of income. The organization also receives funding from various outlets, including the New York Department of Health for the Pride for Youth program, the Town of Huntington for the Huntington hotline serving Huntington residents, Child of Hope Foundation for the Safe Haven program, and donations, fundraising and corporate grants that bring in about $50,000 a year, according to Leonard.
LICC is becoming more creative in its funding efforts. The group is starting a corporate-outreach program, which will offer crisis management to various companies and to individual employees. The first corporation to get aboard is Tweezer Man, based in Glen Cove. The company donated $5,000 to LICC. Leonard hopes many other businesses will follow.
Getting more than you give
Incomparable to any dollar amount of support LICC receives is its volunteer staff. Leonard said, though, that volunteerism has decreased nationally, and LICC is not immune to the trend.
"For us, this is a huge concern," Leonard said. "We can't replace volunteers with paid people."
LICC has a vigorous, multi-step screening and volunteer training program that lasts about nine months. At minimum, LICC requires all volunteers to be at least 15 years old and 18 years old to work the telephone hotlines. Volunteer applicants go through interviews, tests on training manuals and a 16-week seminar. During the seminar, volunteers listen in on phone calls to learn proper procedures and protocol. After the training, volunteers are hooked up with mentors, and the volunteers do the talking, while mentors are listening in on the phone calls and helping if the volunteers start to head in the wrong direction.
"We used to have 20 volunteers training at a time, and now there are 12," Leonard said. "A little more than half finish, but less than half stay a year and pay back the training hours."
Still, the volunteers LICC is able to sustain usually stay for many years and say they could not image life without LICC.
"It is just such a comfortable place to stay," said Maureen Ferrante, a five-year volunteer who was recently hired full time on staff. "The camaraderie of the people who work here is great and we all have the same goals of helping others, so I'm thrilled and proud to be working here."
LICC has served Long Island for the past 30 years and will continue to expand its programs and its mission. When asked how LICC manages to stay afloat, Grenot says the group has a "very frugal director who nickel and dimes us to death," but it is this smart business practice that has kept LICC alive through many trying times.
