GLOVERSVILLE — Staff from The Family Counseling Center were recently honored with the 2021 Telehealth Innovator of the Year award by the North Country Telehealth Partnership, a program of Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization and Adirondack Health Institute.
The award winning project was the organization’s establishment of a Warm Line. A Warm Line is a peer-run hotline that offers emotional support, comfort, and information to callers and is staffed by trained individuals with lived experience. In this case, those individuals were certified Family Peer Advocates who manned the line 24/7 at the peak of the COVID pandemic.
The Warm Line team honored includes Kathleen Calabrese, retired Children and Family Services Director; Jamie Spraker, Family Peer Advocate; Ronald Weaver, School-based Counselor with the Gloversville Enlarged School District; and Kim Smith, School-based Counselor with the Fort Plain School District. They were presented the award during the North Country Leadership Summit on Sept. 15.
