They Listen

It's 3 a.m. in Boston. Cold, dark, lonely. But some people are awake, unable to sleep, or depressed, or maybe on drugs. Perhaps they need advice, or just someone to talk to, so they pick up the phone and call a number in the South End...

"Hello, Project Place. Can I help you?"

Manned 24 hours a day by people trained to deal with all sorts of problems, mundane to urgent, the Project Place hotline is the oldest and largest service of its kind in New England. Working out of a red brick house indistinguishable from the others on the quiet street except for a small sign in the front, the Place volunteers and staff counsel people over the phone and on a drop-in basis, maintain a file for 3000 Boston emergency medical, housing and legal services, and run a free mobile unit service to supplement the protection offered by South Boston hospitals. According to the 1978 annual report, Project Place "responded to over 62,000 calls for help from people throughout the Greater Boston area."

The range of crises Placers are called upon to deal with is enormous, from family problems, child abuse and wife battering to conflicts over alcohol, drugs and sexuality, to depression, loneliness, and potential suicides. All services are free, and the bulk of the work is done by 80 volunteers, who have gone through intensive Place training sessions. There are only 9 paid staffers, 3 full-timers, and 6 part-timers, all of whom volunteer the extra hours needed to keep things running smoothly. This is not a good place to make your fortune.

Project Place grew into this extended role from a drug-counselling center and crash pad in the late '60s. A group of seminarians, including some members of the Harvard Divinity School, opened up their apartment in 1967 for overnight crashing "as a response to all the young people flooding into the city," current Place director Phylis Saindons says. The stream of street people coming in upset the landlords, and the founders of Place were evicted, but the idea had already taken hold. Supported by federal grants, the seminarians relocated in the South End, a few blocks from the current location. Phones were installed the next year to offer hotline service, but Place remained basically "a place for people to be until they could get their heads clear," Saindon says.

As the counterculture slowly dissolved, Place began to evolve into a multi-service agency helping community residents and other age and social groups as well as its original clientele. The staff and budget grew, and more secure funding was established through state and federal public health bureaucracies, foundations, and private donations. Project Place now operates on an annual budget of over $100,000.

Place volunteers have moved on to work in a variety of human services jobs, and Place training has earned a reputation as an excellent way to learn counselling skills in action. Nine hotline training groups were held in 1978, with two experienced counsellors and about 15 neophytes each. Training groups meet one night a week for eight weeks and then hold an intensive encounter group-style weekend. While in training, volunteers familiarize themselves with the mass of literature assigned on counselling, drugs, Place procedures, and available social services. They also observe people on the hotline, answering a few calls themselves when they begin to feel competent, and sit in on regular shifts until they are ready to "anchor" one themselves. Once full-fledged Placers, they continue to meet weekly in supervision groups to discuss problems that have arisen in counselling and to provide peer support. It can get lonely on an overnight shift, and it's hard to maintain your own emotional well-being and balance when you're constantly talking to people contemplating suicide or having a bad trip.

Most of the people who volunteer for Place are young professionals involved in a related field, or working people who just want to help out a little in their extra time, or college students interested in psychology or altruism. While Place has put up posters in subway stations and listed its services in local newspapers, word-of-mouth throughout the last decade has done most to spread the news about Project Place: that it is a good way to help people in need and to learn to counsel effectively. My roommate heard about it from an old roommate of his, and one day took me along to his Tuesday morning shift so I could see for myself how things work out there.

When we arrive, there is someone sleeping on one of the couches, but the bunk bed is unused. The atmosphere is informal. A few chairs and a couch surround a low table with four phone banks on it. The walls are filled with practical information--the phone numbers of hospitals, shelters, advocates for the poor, other counselling services, a chart of information on the synergistic effects of various combinations of drugs, a list of people who aren't allowed to crash there anymore because they were abusing the temporary service. There are voluminous files, and sign-up sheets for hotline and drop-in shifts, and a bulletin board of community announcements and happenings. In the back is a Place version of Peking's democracy wall, a forum for more overtly political discussion. On the wall are a few brightly-covered anti-nuclear posters, which drew forth in response an article from a local newspaper on a group of women engineers who are pro-nuke and think many of the anti-nuke arguments are just a form of solar energy that is to say, hot air. In counter-response someone has circled a paragraph in the article that says how, despite the fact that these women were hired by public utilities financially wedded to the nuclear industry, their views should be taken seriously.

Because of the nature of their work, Place volunteers are very aware of current political and social problems. Frequently they must confront the question of whether to address the larger social issues a caller's specific problems illustrate or to help them adapt to a messed-up social system. This problem is particularly acute on women's issues because the feminist approach of many Place volunteers suggests more radical action than some callers are ready to take.

Unlike some shifts, like the weekend overnights, or the post-holiday mornings, the pace is low-key, and there are times between callers to sit back and ponder the situations that arise and what to say to people. What is mostly required is not knowing the answers--although having some facts at your fingertips is essential for emergencies--but being able to take your own ego out of the interaction and really listen to the caller, respond to them as a caring human being and not make moral judgments about their behavior. The point is to give them both the strength and the incentive to help themselves, to take steps to deal with their problems or to stop doing self-destructive things. Sort of Zen counselling. And it's definitely not a one-way street either--callers often provide good advice and emotional reassurance to counsellors.

Relationships sometimes flower. Some callers may decide to drop in for continuous in person counselling. Others make a habit of calling, becoming regulars that almost everyone comes to know eventually, like lonely old women who just want someone to talk to and find the Place volunteers friendly, open, and interesting. Or the young housewife with kids and responsibilities whose own life got lost in everyone else's until she had a chat with one of the counsellors one day and decided to place the children in day care part of the time so she could pursue her own interests and avoid going crazy. She's called back every Tuesday since, and the satisfaction they both get out of the calls--he by watching her new life unfold, she by getting to know more about him and in turn offer him some advice and comfort--is what Project Place is all about. The bureaucracy, the training, the procedure are meant merely to facilitate this very simple, very old relationship: two people being there for each other.