LEBANON — Listen Community Services has installed a telephone near the entrance to its food pantry on Hough Street that is available 24 hours a day.
The phone comes from RandTel, a Vermont-based cooperative electrical engineer Patrick Schlott started in 2023 to provide free public phone service to communities.
Since then, the cooperative has installed pay phones, which can be operated for free, at the North Tunbridge General Store, Latham Library in Thetford and Woodstock Union High School and Middle School, among other locations, according to RandTel’s website.
Kristi Lenart-Rikert, executive director of Listen Community Services, read about Schlott’s efforts and thought it would be a good service to offer the people Listen serves. Listen is a Lebanon-based nonprofit organization that provides housing, heating and food assistance, among other services, to people in the Upper Valley.
“Not everyone in this area has a cellphone and what we find is clients come to us and they need that connectivity to be able to make important calls,” Lenart-Rikert said in a phone interview, adding that people often need to make calls about employment, transportation and medical appointments. “Making those phone calls is really critical.”
The effort is one of several similar initiatives in the Upper Valley to make phones available to the public. Both public libraries in Lebanon and the Upper Valley Haven in Hartford also have installed public phones recently.
At both the Lebanon Public Library, located at 9 E. Park St. in downtown Lebanon, and the Kilton Public Library, located at 80 Main St. in West Lebanon, providing a public phone the past couple of years was a practical consideration.
“We were having a good number of people asking to use the business phone, which we didn’t mind except there was enough traffic on it that it was getting in the way of business,” Amy Lappin, deputy director of the Lebanon Public Libraries, said in a phone interview. “We were having to limit the amount of time people were spending on that line.”
People of all ages and backgrounds use the phones, from middle schoolers who forgot to charge their cellphones and need to call their parents to older adults calling doctors’ offices.
“Not everyone has an unlimited plan so they have to think about when they use their cellphone,” Lappin said.
Like the phone outside Listen, people can place calls, but not receive them. The phones are available when the libraries are open, Monday through Saturday.
“I really was surprised at how frequently people needed a phone,” Lappin said.
The Upper Valley Haven has seen a similar need, said Will Towne, executive director of the Haven. There are two phones for people to use at the organization’s Community Food Market, located at 713 Hartford Ave., in White River Junction, when the food pantry is open from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday.
“It’s totally a mix, but we definitely see an older population utilizing them,” Towne said in a phone interview.
Reasons vary, from communicating with landlords to setting up transportation to medical appointments. Similar other location, the phones place calls, but cannot receive them.
“It’s really hard to try to manage incoming phone calls on that because you wouldn’t know when somebody would be there,” he said.
Listen’s recently installed phone, which is operated through an internet connection, is located on the Hough Street side of Listen’s location at 60 Hanover St.
It is inside the location’s Resource Shelf, which was previously a pocket food pantry. Members of Lebanon High School’s Interact Club installed the food pantry in 2018 and dedicated to the late Susan Donnelly, a member of the Lebanon Rotary Club.
‘We oftentimes had to dispose of the food if we couldn’t get to it because it wasn’t temperature controlled,” Lenart-Rikert said.
Listen checked with Rotary Club members to make sure they were OK with it being repurposed and they supported the initiative, Lenart-Rikert said. In addition to the telephone, the Resource Shelf also contains naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan; fentanyl test strips and personal hygiene products.
Listen also provides a limited amount of financial assistance to help people purchase minutes for cellphones. The nonprofit organization has $15,000 in its budget for the upcoming fiscal year to put toward those costs.
“That is a significant investment for us, but given the demand, it will not go far,” Lenart-Rikert wrote in a follow-up email.
