Our History

More than 30 years ago, a group of volunteers joined together to answer a telephone. They took calls from people throughout Central Ohio and answered their questions, giving them information that would help them to make choices, take action, and find direction in their lives. This group became known as CALL, Columbus' first community information and referral provider.

Over the next several years, CALL frequently collaborated on projects and shared information with another nonprofit organization, the Volunteer Action Center (VAC). To increase efficiency, the staffs and resources of both agencies were consolidated in 1984 to form CALLVAC. This marked the first time that Central Ohio residents could "one-stop shop," looking to one agency for information on both nonprofit and government programs as well as community volunteerism.

With the new resources provided by consolidation in place, the expansion of existing programs and the development of new ones came rapidly. Increased contact with local agencies expanded our knowledge of the services they provided, as well as their use and need for volunteers. More and more agencies reached out to CALLVAC to help them fulfill their individual missions; CALLVAC was the primary volunteer recruitment and training agency for the 1989 Son of Heaven exhibit, and two years later served as the main source of information and support for Central Ohio families who had loved ones involved in the Gulf War.

CALLVAC continued to grow in complexity as it strived to meet the spectrum of our community's needs, and was renamed FIRSTLINK in 1995 to reflect our development into an organization that possessed a scope far greater than the original.

  • Executive director Marilee Chinnici-Zuercher raised the agency into the international sphere when she was elected membership to the National Council of Volunteer Centers for the Points of Light Foundation. Representing the United States for the international Volunteer Center Task Force, she worked on the development of a worldwide directory of volunteer centers and fostered relationships with representatives from such locales as Moscow, Russia and Saitama Prefecture, Japan, teaching them American techniques for recruiting, training, and utilizing volunteers.
  • FIRSTLINK developed the most comprehensive training program in Central Ohio devoted to the issues surrounding civic responsibility. With such topics as volunteer management, nonprofit administration, and the creation of superior boards (to name a few) built into the curriculum, the program filled a large gap within the nonprofit sector.
  • With our array of connections in the nonprofit sector and state-of-the-art technical infrastructure, FIRSTLINK became the main source of data concerning community wants and needs, helping both funders and city leaders address the expansion and development of community programming. Community professionals, too, came to rely more and more on our annual FIRSTLINK Directory, which is printed directly from our database of service providers and puts into their hands almost all of the information that our referral specialists use.

The public demand for our information services increases constantly: in 2000 alone, our referral specialists responded to more than 180,000 requests over our phone lines. To meet the challenges of the future, we recently partnered with Battelle Memorial Institute in the design, development, and implementation of one of the most sophisticated commercial databases in the world. We also integrated new technology into our phone system which maximized the efficiency of our information and referral process.

These advances help to position FIRSTLINK for the implementation of 211, a universal information and referral telephone number which is sure to heighten public awareness of our available services.