Community for Community's Sake
The origin story of Ulster County’s largest nonprofit for social services isn’t just humble.
It’s downright quaint.
In July of 1970, Woodstock residents gathered for a town meeting to discuss what they should do about the displaced young people, otherwise known as hippies, who’d drifted into town. They’d arrived by way of the famous rock festival — which had little to do with Woodstock, some 50 miles away — and taken shelter amongst tombstones in the local cemetery. Woodstock, then about 5,000 residents small (without a single stoplight, let alone a public toilet) didn’t want to involve the police. But they didn’t want to throw a welcome party, either. And so one resident threw the youngsters a line:
“Well if there’s a problem, have them call me,” said a woman named Gale.
It began as a helpline, more or less, neighbors being neighborly. “From those incredibly rudimentary beginnings, we run the oldest continuously operated emergency switchboard in the country,” says Michael Berg, executive director of Family of Woodstock. “It has operated 24 hours a day for 51 years — it speaks to a community’s commitment to each other.”
Berg has worked at the nonprofit since 1972, running the hotline’s night shift from 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. every Thursday night for ten years. It’s a different Woodstock today; he’s watched — and listened — as the nonprofit’s services grow in tandem with the growing community’s needs.
“When we started in 1970 there weren’t issues of survival — we didn’t start giving out food until 1975, when there was a downturn in the economy,” he says. “But we see many, many more people that are struggling to survive than we did years ago.”
Meeting those needs, Family of Woodstock extends well beyond its namesake. It’s no longer just a hotline, either. The nonprofit operates four walk-in centers, in Woodstock but also New Paltz, Ellenville, and Kingston. It operates emergency shelters — totaling over 80 beds — for runaway and homeless youth, adults recovering from addiction, and survivors of domestic violence. There are child care programs, case management and care coordination services, food pantries, and programs for restorative justice that began before the groundswell for such programs mainstreamed.
“We run a program called One80, which responds to kids in school, and young people in the criminal justice system, to give them an alternative to just punishment, or suspension,” says Berg. “That program is now being expanded to older people, 18 to 26 year olds, in the hope of putting people back on the right path.” It gives them an opportunity to fix what they did, to right their wrong. It offers mobility — the ability to move on.
Through it all, the nonprofit’s success was built on one seemingly obvious approach: don’t judge. It’s among the reasons why, last year, and just measuring the agency’s hotline services alone, 68,594 individuals and their families reached out to Family of Woodstock for assistance.
“It’s important that people feel safe. If people are struggling with mental health issues, or substance abuse issues, or if they broke the law, these are all difficult subjects to address, and so we try to make it as easy and as available as possible,” explains Berg. “We’ve tried to build our agency around providing safety for people, so that if they need help they can ask for it.”
Although they work tirelessly to maintain their long running mantra of helping “any problem under the sun,” they can’t help with everything. And yet, that has never stopped them from trying, even throughout a particularly painful last year, as the nonprofit marked its 50th anniversary in the midst of a pandemic that was tantamount to worldwide trauma.
Through it all, the switchboard, the nonprofit’s original pulse, along with most of its programs, never went dark: when help was needed most, community answered the call.
Find @familyofwoodstock in Kingston, New York.
www.familyofwoodstockinc.org
By Keith Flanagan
Image courtesy of Family of Woodstock
Volume 7
