Oregon’s Warmline is a hotline people can call to get support and talk through issues with a peer. For the second quarter of 2023, the service received over 20,000 calls across the state, a more than 40% increase in demand compared to last year. But while need for the service is there, a state grant is expected to expire in the spring, throwing the future of the program into question. Kimberly Lindsay is the executive director of Community Counseling Services, the nonprofit that operates the line. She joins us to share what demand has been like for the warmline and the options the organization is considering to keep the service going.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon’s Warmline is a service people can call to get peer support for mental health issues that haven’t yet reached crisis levels. Twenty thousand calls came in in the second quarter of 2023, a huge increase compared to the year before, but a key state grant is expected to expire in the spring throwing the future of the program into question. Kimberly Lindsay is the executive director of Community Counseling Services. That’s the nonprofit that operates the line. She joins us now to talk about where they are. Welcome to the show.
Kimberly Lindsay: Great. Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. What is your definition of a warmline?
Lindsay: So a warmline… it’s almost easier to start with what it’s not. So when we think about a suicide crisis line or just a crisis line, those lines are more focused on keeping people safe, and in the moment, getting them connected to a crisis resource as quickly as possible. Sometimes, people may just want to talk with someone. They may just be experiencing some big issues in their life and they’d like to be able to reach out to someone, but for whatever reason, a loved one or somebody within their support system isn’t appropriate or available and that’s where a warmline comes into play. It’s a free, confidential number that you can call to have a conversation with someone who can provide support during difficult times. Whether you’re in crisis or not, a warmline is a safe place for people to call, and they’re staffed by trained peers who have been through their own mental health struggles and know what it’s like to need help.
Miller: So who is on the other end of the line and how do you find people to staff it?
Lindsay: Like I said ‒ what I just ended with ‒ the other end of the line is staffed by people who have been there, done that. So they’ve had their own mental health or addictions issues. They’re in recovery and they have received training to work on the warmline.
How do we find them? Well, we advertise on traditional venues. We are on our website. We advertise with the employment department. We also advertise within community mental health programs across the state, and just that alone tends to generate enough referrals. So when we put a position out there, there’s generally a fair amount of interest in the positions that we’re advertising for.
Miller: And these are paid positions?
Lindsay: Yes, that’s exactly what I was going to say. There are many warmlines that are staffed by volunteers, and volunteers are the heart of America. But we wanted to go a step farther when we created the warmline, and we wanted to really show value to the peers that are doing the work and keep them. With volunteers, there can be a lot of turnover. Less so when it’s a paid position, and all of our peers are paid.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for how a conversation may play out? So somebody calls in and says they’re feeling lonely or they’re dealing with some serious issues.
Where might it go from there?
Lindsay: Well, just to be clear, I’m not an operator on the warmline. So I don’t want to mislead and take away from their awesomeness. But I can give a general sense. So all of our warmline operators are trained in the intentional peer support model, IPS developed by Shery Mead. It’s a national model. IPS is a way of thinking about relationships in a some might say a transformative way, in a healthy way. We want to connect with them, come alongside them, help them look at things from different angles, develop some awareness around what’s going on, talk about maybe any patterns that they may be seeing or potentially were seeing, and just support them in looking at it differently and to work with them to come up with a solution. So it’s really about learning and growing with the person rather than the operator telling them what they need to do.
Miller: Not too long ago, the state, the Oregon Health Authority, gave you a $2.6 million budget increase, a grant. What were you able to do with that extra money?
Lindsay: We worked with the state [and] identified a budget to take the warmline that at the time, about a year ago, was 18 hours a day and English speaking only. We worked with the state to take the warmline to being 24 hours a day staffed by multiple operators at any one time and to to add a bilingual line. So the funding increased from $1.1 million a biennium to $2.6 million per biennium, a two-year period. And again, the big difference was increasing it to 24 hours a day and adding a bilingual line.
Miller: How big of an increase in calls did that lead to?
Lindsay: Well, we’re still realizing the increase because we received formal approval and the contract was signed last fall. It took us a little while to get up to speed. So, we were fully staffed in the spring. So for comparison, the call volume for last year, the July through September period, we’d received 16,000 calls. After being fully staffed ‒ which again started late in the spring and roughly around April or May ‒ so, three months after being fully staffed, the July through September period we received and just looking at this report, we received approximately 26,000 calls. So what would that be? That’s roughly about a 30% increase in call volume.
Miller: Ok. So that’s a sort of incomplete number, but a big increase already so far.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Miller: Meanwhile, you heard from the state in August that this was going to be ending. What exactly did they tell you?
Lindsay: Well, just to be candid, we heard from the state not too long after we were fully staffed that the funding was going to end. The increase was funded by ARP dollars or what just loosely we call them the COVID dollars funding that came from the Feds. And to be completely transparent, this was deep in our contract that there were ARP dollars, so we did miss that. In fairness to us though, when we put this together, there were no conversations with the state where we recall any discussion about one-time dollars. And we also wouldn’t have increased it to be 24/7 and at all of the staff that we did, had we known that these were one-time dollars.
Miller: Okay. So in other words, in the fine print, the state said this is one-time dollars. You didn’t realize that and ramped up thinking that this would be long-term.
Lindsay: Ongoing.
Miller: Ongoing. Where does that leave you now?
Lindsay: So when we realized that it was not ongoing… Well, I won’t go into all of the details, but we were in the process of making layoffs and thanks to an 11th hour save, really late 11th hour save and a lot of interventions from a local commissioner here in Umatilla County and some state legislators, OHA did agree to continue to fund the warmline one for six additional months. That was the initial language that we received in an email. I do need to add that just 30 minutes ago, I received an email that OHA is going to fund the warmline for one more year, minus any funding that CCOs might send us. So there’s a little ambiguity in that, but we did just receive word. I think it was about 11:45 that I received word that we were going to be fully funded for one more year. So that’s very exciting.
Miller: Kimberly Lindsay, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it
Lindsay: Yep.
Miller: Kimberly Lindsay is the executive director of Community Counseling Services.
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