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My new volunteer project
Dec. 4th, 2014 07:08 pmA number of years back, I volunteered for the Samaritans suicide hotline for a while. I was pretty good at it, but transportation was a pain. It takes a while to get from Melrose to Kenmore Square after the busses stop running, which they do early in Melrose, and if I was doing a night shift, I could be stuck in that 2 am to 5 am period where there aren't any trains. Driving wasn't an option -- first, Lis and I had and have only one car, and second, even if I had it, I'd have had to park in or around Kenmore Square.
The work is good, and rewarding, but the transportation cuts down on their pool of volunteers. They draw heavily from BU college students, who live in the area, and can often have more unusual schedules -- if it's a quiet night and the volunteers have downtime in which they can do homework or study, and if they can walk to and from their dorms or apartments, a shift that goes until 4 am isn't necessarily a problem. But it was for me.
Anyway, Lis found an interesting article about data analysis of bullying and crisis patterns for teens and pre-teens in crisis. There is a service, "Crisis Text Line", which provides crisis support and active listening to teens in crisis through a texting platform. The people who run it do word frequency analysis on (completely anonymized) crisis conversations to work out time-of-day patterns to see what problems tend to show up when.
Lis looked at this, and told me I should look into it. It was a crisis support line based on text. Based on typing into a computer.
Typing into a computer has been my primary, preferred method of communication since I was sixteen and on the ARGUS and Games Galaxy BBSes. I got onto Usenet when I turned eighteen. I've communicated by everything from Google Hangouts all the way back to ntalk and TTY services.
And right now, I'm typing this into LiveJournal, because, even though it's mostly considered obsolete, it's the most text-based service since Usenet.
This is how I think. This is how I work.
So I looked into it.
And I've passed the interviews and the background checks, and my first live training session was last night.
And you know what? I'm actually volunteering for the Samaritans again.
The way it works is that someone in crisis texts "START" to 741741 (the left side of your keypad twice). Crisis Text Line is a tech backbone which other groups work with. CTL kicks it over to a volunteer at Samaritans or Common Ground, who takes the call, and offers support through texting.
Because text is the native language of a lot of kids.
And text is MY native language, too.
I'm looking forward to this.
The work is good, and rewarding, but the transportation cuts down on their pool of volunteers. They draw heavily from BU college students, who live in the area, and can often have more unusual schedules -- if it's a quiet night and the volunteers have downtime in which they can do homework or study, and if they can walk to and from their dorms or apartments, a shift that goes until 4 am isn't necessarily a problem. But it was for me.
Anyway, Lis found an interesting article about data analysis of bullying and crisis patterns for teens and pre-teens in crisis. There is a service, "Crisis Text Line", which provides crisis support and active listening to teens in crisis through a texting platform. The people who run it do word frequency analysis on (completely anonymized) crisis conversations to work out time-of-day patterns to see what problems tend to show up when.
Lis looked at this, and told me I should look into it. It was a crisis support line based on text. Based on typing into a computer.
Typing into a computer has been my primary, preferred method of communication since I was sixteen and on the ARGUS and Games Galaxy BBSes. I got onto Usenet when I turned eighteen. I've communicated by everything from Google Hangouts all the way back to ntalk and TTY services.
And right now, I'm typing this into LiveJournal, because, even though it's mostly considered obsolete, it's the most text-based service since Usenet.
This is how I think. This is how I work.
So I looked into it.
And I've passed the interviews and the background checks, and my first live training session was last night.
And you know what? I'm actually volunteering for the Samaritans again.
The way it works is that someone in crisis texts "START" to 741741 (the left side of your keypad twice). Crisis Text Line is a tech backbone which other groups work with. CTL kicks it over to a volunteer at Samaritans or Common Ground, who takes the call, and offers support through texting.
Because text is the native language of a lot of kids.
And text is MY native language, too.
I'm looking forward to this.