Earlier this month, a fellow social media producer from another corner of the blogosphere shared with this editor a draft of a video he was working on to bring attention to the 10th anniversary of 1-800-SUICIDE, also known as the Hopeline. The final version came out earlier this week, and in it, Kristin Brooks Hope Center founder Reese Butler talks about why he created the Hopeline, and some of the challenges the organization now faces as a privately funded charity operation entering its second decade of connecting callers with, as he puts it, help and hope.
But despite several years of government support in the form of a grant that ended in 2004, the Hopeline is running into funding issues that are partly a result of the government’s subsequent decision to create its own hotline rather than support a private one. Among Butler’s concerns about the “new” hotline: There’s no transparency or explicit policy about what the national hotline does with the data it gets from its calls, and instead of connecting callers to trained, empathetic mental health professionals, the national hotline is more apt to call the police. Frank Warren of PostSecret, a Hopeline volunteer, also contributes to the video asking for viewers’ support, with several postcard/art submissions that have come in to his site bearing witness to support they have received from 1-800-SUICIDE.
Learn more about the Kristin Brooks Hope Center and the Hopeline here.