Hear to Help

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Origin Story

As an investigations caseworker, he works closely with parents experiencing substance use. He finds meaning in supporting people who are struggling to transform their lives under incredibly challenging circumstances. 

Our conversation is grounded in a "Journey Map" inspired by the lives of those with pregnancy-associated death in Maine. The composite patient’s “journey” was created by the Maine Maternal, Fetal, and Infant Mortality Review Panel to humanize the study’s data. The caseworker told me that the Journey Map captures well the all-encompassing nature of substance use. He shared that he feels a responsibility to be there for clients and does everything possible to prioritize responding to their messages. “How can we ask them to change their lives if we can’t be there when they need something?” he asked.

He spoke to his clients’ deep need to feel heard, and the compassion that grows within him as he listens to them. His face brightened as he told me about how he’d once run into a past client who’d excitedly shared that she’d been reunified with her child. “We’re all human at the end of the day,” he asserted. “I really just want to help people achieve what they want to achieve.”

Beck Klassen, Listener Poet
September 2026

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Hear to Help

By Beck Klassen, Listener Poet

At its core, my job is to listen.
To offer nonjudgemental presence
to people in really real situations,
whose struggles are all-encompassing.
I am here to help people achieve 
what they are striving for.

Always, I try
to meet people where they are; 
that is,
to do all that I can
to make them feel heard.

As people, we all just want to feel heard.

Then, moving in that space
of understanding, 
of advocacy,
I raise what I need to. 
I seek our common ground. 
I make myself available to those 
who can't always predict or plan 
when they will need me.
We train our collective gaze
on reunification: 

what you want for yourself
is what I want for you.

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