Major Missed Opportunities

Currently, on Intercom, our text-based chat platform we have tracked over 3000 conversations! Our fellow volunteers have been serving really faithfully. Praise God for their hard work.
We finished redesigning our Choose Life website a few months ago. 🙌

Our next goal is upgrading our entire communication platform. This means transitioning from Intercom to a more involved and powerful integration. I'm excited to work on it, but it's going to have a large learning curve.

Our team knows we can do better, we can do much better. Particularly in terms of conversation quality and quality of care.

Having these critical, life-changing conversations over text chat is not ideal, to say the least.

1. It's easy to miss people who need to talk with us. If we don't respond within 3 minutes the person needing help will miss our reply almost every time.
2. Text doesn't carry the emotional weight and caring inflection of an audible human voice. Volunteers are also unable to hear what condition the person is truly in through a chat box.
   Of course, we are honored to continue opening individual streams of communication that anyone fighting for hope can easily use! But there are better modes of communicating.
   
   Depression and distress is exceedingly disorienting. The major goal is to alleviate any barrier to effective conversation in that situation.
   
   Ideal conversation here is a meeting of two hearts, not merely of two minds.
   
   Simply hearing the nuanced care of another human voice is vastly more effective prevention. Being present for these people is so critical.
   
   From the beginning of our training program, phone call intervention was always the focus.
   We learned from the professional psychologist leading our team that prevention phone lines in Japan have long wait times. Sometimes it's 30+ minutes that people wait in a phone queue until they talk with a volunteer. The need is great.
   
   On our end, finding the right phone call platform volunteers can use remotely, has unexpectedly pushed this challenge into a long and serious search.
   
   We are still praying for wisdom and guidance as volunteers to integrate the right platform for future growth and expansion.
   
   The leader of our project, a very capable IT pro in his own right, suggested we look into Amazon Connect.
   
   It's an answer to prayer he found that! I've been looking on and off for a similar solution myself for a while.
   
   This platform has a number of the features we need, notably a phone call prevention infrastructure with reasonable costs.
   
   I'm excited to work with him and our team on integrating that into our system. It's a major puzzle piece to meeting my personal goal of seeing 10,000 suicide intervention chats by April 21st, 2021.
   
   Thank you again so much for all your prayers and support. We're all in this flight together, everything and everyone counts. After all, Jesus even rewards cups of water given in good faith.
   
   What have you been working on lately?