Agencies Agency Stories Peter Believes in 211
Peter Believes in 211
Peter Brooksbank is an organized man. When a job needs doing he gets right to it without wasting time. So when his father-in-law recently had his leg amputated, Peter set to work trying to locate services that would make life easier for the 78-year-old man.
Peter ended up feeling frustrated and stressed. “We’d phone one initial place and they’d refer us to someplace else, which would refer us to someplace else and so on,” Peter said.
Peter was trying to figure out if his father-in-law qualified for wheelchair loan programs or loans to modify his house with a ramp, chair-lift or anything else to make his home wheelchair accessible.
“We thought at first ‘”Where do we go?” Peter said.
He started by thumbing through the phone book. His thought was simple: Start calling around different agencies and ask to be pointed in the right direction.
Peter left numerous messages and returned many calls but found he was getting nowhere.
“It was a very stressful situation for the family,” he recalls. “Every corner we turned there was a hindrance or a stumbling block of some kind.”
A system like 211 – an easy to remember information number for available services – appeals to Peter now that he’s had first hand experience trying to find help.
If he was advising someone today who was looking for information on community services, Peter would tell them to prepare to spend a long time on the phone.
“And on-line,” he said. “I would give them a list of numbers we called, tell them who we Googled and tell them what we did. That’s what you have to do unless something like 211 is available.”
In the end, the family got what they needed to help Peter’s father-in-law, but the Lower Sackville family believes getting that information could have been a lot easier.
“One number could save a family a lot of unnecessary stress”.
