3/09/2002
CONTACT:
Grant Taylor
The Kids Help Foundation Trust
09-630-4144
09-630-4840
grant@whatsup.co.nz
Calls To What’s Up Children’s Help Line Top 100,000
The What’s Up telephone counselling service for children and young people has answered its 100,000th call and is on
target to have answered 114,000 calls by the time it marks its first year of operations on September 21.
This exceeds the initial first year target of 90,000, says the service’s Executive Director Grant Taylor.
What’s Up receives calls from children and young people all over New Zealand. Almost half the calls received concern
relationship issues with peers, family or partners. Another quarter are about school-related problems, particularly
bullying.
The service aims to intervene early in children’s lives and develop their abilities to solve problems, preventing the
likelihood of serious crises arising later.
“Our aim is to make it easy for children and young people to access professional counselling services. We are delighted
with our success in achieving this. Clearly there is a high demand for the kind of service we are offering,” says Mr
Taylor.
“We are currently receiving 592 calls per day on average.
“About 75% of our calls now are from people who have contacted us previously, which I think is an endorsement of the
help we are offering to our callers. Unfortunately, present resources mean that we can only answer about half of the
calls we receive.”
He said consistent with the What’s Up model of professionalism, counsellors are paid for their work and so answering
more calls is dependent on the service being able to expand its funding.
“Currently we receive funding from our four major sponsors and obtain some grants from philanthropic trusts. We would be
pleased to receive donations from the public as the quality and value of our work for New Zealand’s children and young
people is recognised,” said Mr Taylor.
# # #