There’s an effort in Rochester to get phones made available to people who can’t afford them.
The initiative to provide this free phone service began when local photographer and Assistant Professor at RIT/NTID Eric Kunsman was doing a project several years ago to document the dwindling number of pay phones locally.
He said that as of January 2024, Frontier Communications disconnected the last active pay phones in Monroe County. Kunsman said that as of 2018, when he was doing his photography project, there were more than 1,400 pay phones around the county, but not all of them worked.
Kunsman and a few others recently started something called the GoodPhone Project. For now, this pilot program involves just one of these special phones, which is a former pay phone converted into one that uses Voice Over Internet Protocol, (VoIP), which is basically a phone that gets its service through the internet.
It’s located inside a phone booth at the Father Tracy Advocacy Center on North Clinton Avenue. Kunzman said this phone also has the capability of providing individual voicemail boxes for people who use it.
“If somebody is applying for a job rather than leaving the Father Tracy phone number or Open Door Mission, depending on where they’re at to get support, they can now have a phone number themselves with the extension, and people can leave them voicemails and that they can access across the entire network,” Kunsman said.
Kunsman would like to eventually see more of these converted pay phones established in other parts of the county.
“We’re hoping that we can get many more going,” said Kunsman, “but again, it will be reliant on funding from either donors or grants to be able to put them throughout and strategically, we’re not going to try to replace where all the Frontier phones were. We need to look at the neighborhoods where there’s the most need and whether it’s homeless shelters or food kitchens, the individuals might need to rely on the ‘GoodPhone.’”
Kunsman said there is certainly a need for individuals who cannot afford any kind of phone, and as proof of that, he points to the use of the converted pay phone at the Father Tracy Advocacy Center. He said it is being used an average of 14 times a day.
Future plans may also include integrating high-speed WiFi into the phone’s capabilities.