Michael Berg said the decade he spent working weekly overnight shifts for Family of Woodstock’s crisis hotline, starting in the mid-1970s, was transformational.
“It changed me,” said Berg, Family’s 81-year-old executive director. “I got to be really in touch with the pain and the stuff that people were going through.”
For about six months, the same woman would regularly call about 10:15 p.m. and immediately burst into tears.
“She was a young mother, a single mom, her husband was gone, she had stage four cancer and she had two young children,” he recalled. “She didn’t know how she was going to even tell them, let alone what was going to happen to them.
“I would just listen,” Berg said. “She would just talk about how afraid she was and how hard it was. She’d talk for about a half-hour and then she’d say, ‘I think I can go to sleep now. Thank you.’”
Berg, who joined Family as a volunteer drug abuse counselor and is now its executive director, has good reason to contemplate his career. After 56 years, he plans to retire Sept. 30.
Replacing him at the agency, which has a $19 million annual budget and 150 full-time employees, will be Deputy Director Paul Rakov, 58, who leads its fundraising and communications efforts. Rakov’s parents volunteered with Family.
“Michael has been a fixture in the community for as long as I can remember,” said Rakov, who considers Berg to be his mentor. “We should all be so lucky to leave behind the legacy he is leaving.”
Family emerged in July 1970 in the aftermath of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair a year earlier, when the town was inundated with young people seeking “Bob Dylan and the Woodstock nation,” Berg said.
As residents gathered to discuss alternatives to a police response to the wave of visitors, who sometimes needed food, clothing, and housing, a woman named Gael Varsi offered her phone number for people to call in an emergency. She arranged for a friend to answer the phone when she was out.
Thus began Family’s hotline. Team members still answer that phone, 845-679-2485. It is the nation’s oldest continuously operating phone crisis hotline, Berg said.
Family’s goal when it launched in 1970 was to create a safe place for people to seek help. Its work is guided by three principles, Berg said: respect everyone, avoid telling people what to do, and withhold judgment.
Family also oversaw crisis intervention centers at the Woodstock anniversary festivals staged in Saugerties in 1994 and in Rome, N.Y., in 1999.
Berg began as a volunteer substance abuse counselor with the Soft Landing Machine, which aimed to help people experiencing issues with drugs, especially of the psychedelic variety. He joined the board in 1971 and also served as treasurer and president.
Family’s first executive director, hired in 1981, lasted just nine months. Berg replaced him that year and has held the role since.
Family’s services include emergency shelter and transitional housing, with a 19-bed shelter for homeless single individuals, a 27-bed shelter for homeless families, a 14-bed shelter for runaway and homeless youth, a 17-bed domestic violence shelter, and a six-bed shelter for older homeless adolescents. The agency also offers mental health support services, restorative justice services, services in Spanish, and affordable, emergency, and senior housing.
“There is no individual in Ulster County I can think of who has made a more positive impact on the lives of struggling residents over the last five decades than Michael Berg,” said Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger. “Under his leadership, Family of Woodstock has provided a truly impressive diversity of services, always evolving and innovating to meet new needs, and always guided by compassion and respect for the dignity of every individual the organization serves.”
Berg arrived in the Hudson Valley in 1970, when he traveled to Saugerties from his home in Greenwich Village to help his brother, a sculptor, open a woodworking factory.
A friend looking for mental health support discovered Family and said they should get involved because it was “the only game in town.” As he worked with Family, Berg eased out of the woodworking factory.
Berg intends to work with Family after his retirement. He’ll also return to the woodworking that brought him to Ulster County. While the factory has been dormant for decades, Berg’s home in Saugerties has plenty of tools, including five band saws.
As he gears up for life’s next chapter, one memory stands out. It was at Woodstock ’94, when a 16-year-old girl made her way to Family’s crisis intervention center. She’d traveled to the show from Indiana with her boyfriend and lost touch with him soon after they entered the festival.
“She broke down,” Berg said. “She knew nobody. She had no money. She had no way to get home. We took care of her.”
Family paid her bus fare back home.
John W. Barry is a reporter for The Overlook. Reach him at john@theoverlooknews.com.