In 1970, Michael Berg was a young woodworker with a graduate degree in ancient Greek history and no particular plan to become a social worker. He had come north from New York City to join his brother, a sculptor, in opening a woodworking factory in Saugerties. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary. Then his brother became ill, Berg’s wife resisted returning to the city, and a colleague went looking for mental-health support in Woodstock.
“He came back and said, ‘There’s this thing called Family. It’s the only game in town. We should get involved,’” Berg recalls.
Family of Woodstock had emerged from the confusion following the 1969 Woodstock festival, when young people began arriving in town in search of Bob Dylan, the “Woodstock Nation,” or whatever remained of the promised countercultural utopia. Some arrived without food, shelter, or any practical plan. At a community meeting convened to discuss the situation, Woodstock resident Gael Varsi offered her telephone number to anyone who needed help and arranged for friends to answer when she was unavailable.
Berg began volunteering in 1970 with Family’s Soft Landing Machine, which responded to drug-related emergencies. His credentials, as he now cheerfully describes them, were straightforward: “I just took drugs and talked people down from psychedelics at that time.”
What Berg discovered in those encounters would become the animating principle of his life’s work. Someone frightened or disoriented did not necessarily need to be told what to do. First, they needed to feel safe enough to speak.
“You show people respect,” Berg says. “You don’t tell people what to do, because when you tell people what to do, they close down. And you don’t burden people with your judgment of what they did.”
Fifty-six years later, Berg is preparing to step down as executive director of an organization that bears little outward resemblance to the informal volunteer network he joined. Family of Woodstock now operates 27 programs with 170 full-time and 50 part-time employees. Its work includes emergency and transitional housing, domestic-violence services, food pantries, childcare support, restorative justice, counseling, court advocacy, and services for young people. According to the organization, Family reaches more than 50,000 people each year.
The original hotline remains active around the clock, still using the same Woodstock telephone number: 845-679-2485.
Berg, now 81, joined Family’s newly incorporated board in 1971 and spent the next decade as a volunteer, serving in positions including president and treasurer while continuing to run the woodworking business. Family hired its first executive director in 1981. The experiment lasted about nine months, after which Berg stepped into the position. He never left.
For Radio Kingston CEO Jimmy Buff, Berg’s arrival at Family appears almost preordained. “I don’t know what he was supposed to be doing with his life,” Buff says, “but when he stepped into what became Family of Woodstock, he stepped into something that was lifelong for him. He was for the moment, and the moment was for him.”
Learning to Listen
“Any Problem Under the Sun,” Family’s longtime motto, can sound like an impossibly expansive promise. Berg explains that it was never meant to suggest that the organization could solve everything. It meant that anyone could call with any problem and be taken seriously. Staff and volunteers would listen, determine what the person was seeking, and explore where help might be found.
“What is the person seeking?” Berg says. “It’s not what you’re prepared to give. It’s what is the person seeking help with.”
That open-ended approach shaped Family’s growth. The agency did not begin with a strategic plan to become a sprawling human-services network. Its programs developed as needs presented themselves. When Family was told that volunteers could no longer bring runaway teenagers into their homes, it pursued funding for a youth shelter. When the economic downturn of the mid-1970s brought the first requests for food, it opened a food pantry. Domestic-violence services, homeless shelters, childcare programs, and restorative-justice initiatives followed.
“We’re not a mental-health agency, we’re not a substance-abuse agency, we’re not a housing agency, but we do all of those things,” Berg says. “We respond to what people need instead of having our preconceived idea of what we’re going to give people.”
Susan Goldman first met Berg around 1971 while volunteering with the Woodstock food co-op. She accompanied Berg and his friend David Abel on a 4am produce run to Hunts Point Market, riding in one of Berg’s vans and talking along the way. She remembers him as energetic, enthusiastic, and capable of making any volunteer project seem both attractive and achievable.
Goldman became involved with Family later in the decade, when she volunteered with its fledgling domestic-violence program and was required to undergo hotline training. She “basically never left,” moving through several paid and volunteer positions over the ensuing decades.
She credits Berg with creating an organization where people were encouraged to develop services around their own abilities and interests. Her current project, HomeShare Ulster County, which matches residents with spare rooms to people seeking affordable housing, originated with the Town of Woodstock Housing Committee but needed an organizational home. Goldman brought the idea to Berg.
“He said, ‘Yeah, you’ll come along,’” she recalls. “That’s how things over the years have developed at Family—driven by people’s interests, passions, and creativity and matched up to funding sources as often as possible.”
That willingness to improvise was tested spectacularly at Woodstock ’94, where Goldman helped oversee Family’s crisis-intervention operation. The agency trained approximately 200 volunteers to assist what became a temporary city of some 400,000 people in Saugerties. They reunited separated concertgoers, helped people locate medications abandoned in an unrecognizable sea of tents, and found shelter for those who had nowhere to sleep.
When rain and cold left concertgoers barefoot, soaked, and dangerously chilled, the team persuaded engineers to reverse the air conditioning in a corporate hospitality tent and convert it into a warming station. Tour buses assigned to performers began transporting mud-covered attendees to a triage area.
Family returned for Woodstock ’99 in Rome, where anger, fire, and violence replaced much of the earlier festival’s communal spirit. Berg considers both festivals high points in the organization’s history—evidence that, despite its growth and professionalization, Family could still meet a crisis with the adaptability of its early years. “We responded on the ground as if it was 1972,” Goldman says.
A Place at the Table
Family’s survival was hardly guaranteed. In the mid-1970s, after the organization challenged public-assistance decisions and became caught in a bitter confrontation with county officials, Ulster County withheld nearly all of its public funding. The sum represented $69,000 of Family’s $78,000 budget. The organization laid off its three paid employees and operated entirely through volunteers for approximately nine months while appealing the decision.
The conflict drew an unexpected outpouring of support. At a public hearing, ministers, law-enforcement officials, social-service professionals, and residents testified about Family’s work. The state eventually gave the county a choice: restore the funding or lose any local say over the money when New York funded Family directly. The county relented.
For Berg, the episode produced an enduring political lesson. Family could advocate aggressively, but it could not become an appendage of either political party. People in crisis would continue to need help regardless of which faction controlled Woodstock, Kingston, Albany, or Washington.
That independence has allowed Berg to work inside government systems while challenging them. Mike Iapoce, commissioner of the Ulster County Department of Social Services, began working closely with Berg after becoming commissioner in 2012. Family contracts with the county to provide services for which government is ultimately responsible, placing the two institutions in near-constant contact.
Iapoce describes Berg as both an inspiration and a mentor. He points to Family’s shelters—including facilities serving individuals, families, young people, and survivors of domestic violence—as highly visible achievements. He also emphasizes Berg’s comparatively unheralded work with the Ulster County Continuum of Care, which directs federal funding toward permanent supportive and affordable housing.
Over decades, Iapoce says, Berg helped bring funding for hundreds of housing units and rent-support programs into the county, providing stability for thousands of people.
“Michael has been one of the primary people responsible for stable, secure housing for individuals and families in Ulster County,” Iapoce says. “That would not have happened without Michael Berg.”
To Iapoce, Family represents one of the few durable institutions to emerge from the idealism attached to Woodstock. “They took a concept like Woodstock—an idea—and turned it into a reality,” he says. “Through understanding, support, and helping people, they’ve sustained that notion.”
No Way Out
Housing is also the problem Berg finds most maddening as he prepares to leave his position. Family has operated Ulster County’s licensed shelters since the 1970s, but the system no longer functions as it once did. People enter emergency housing and cannot find an affordable place to move. Shelter stays grow longer, hope recedes, and temporary accommodations begin to feel permanent. “I’m running shelters and people can’t get out of them,” Berg says. “It’s a failure.”
He offers a characteristically practical analysis. A person working 35 hours a week at $20 an hour can reasonably devote roughly $900 a month to rent and utilities. Apartments at that price have nearly disappeared. Meanwhile, emergency shelter can cost the public system $4,170 a month.
Berg wants government to bridge the gap by subsidizing permanent housing, saving thousands of dollars while giving people a stable place to live. He is seeking support for a demonstration program involving 10 individuals or families over three years.
“Even people who have substance abuse or a mental-health issue—do you think they’re going to gain mental health while living on the street, or in a hotel they have to change every couple of days?” he asks. “No. It’s not working.”
That unfinished campaign complicates the idea that Berg is retiring. So does everything else about him.
Goldman describes her longtime friend as brash, deeply emotional, intensely informed, and fiercely loyal. He loves cycling and travel, although work increasingly displaced both over the course of his career. Friends sometimes saw too little of him. Family became a profession, an identity, and the organizing principle of his adult life.
“We’ve not known life without Michael at Family,” Goldman says. “It’s going to be very difficult for him to shed this skin.”
Buff also resists describing Berg as a conventional workaholic. “I don’t know that it has felt like work to him as much as a meaningful existence,” he says. “We all should be so lucky to do work that’s meaningful.”
Family will honor Berg on September 26 with “An Evening with Michael Berg: Celebrating a Lifetime of Service” at Diamond Mills Resort in Saugerties. Paul Rakov will succeed him as executive director in October.
Berg plans to travel, work on the family home, and reopen the dormant Saugerties woodworking shop. He also hopes to finish approximately 20 pieces left incomplete by his brother and organize an exhibition of his work.
When asked what a workaholic does in retirement, Berg does not hesitate. “Work,” he says.
He will also continue his housing advocacy and remain involved with Family. After 56 years, he recognizes that other people will lead the organization, make decisions, and take it somewhere he cannot entirely foresee. He is proud of the volunteers and staff who transformed a telephone number into a regional safety net, and he insists that Family was never about him.
Still, he is not surrendering all claims upon it. “I’m also not leaving Family. I think it’s a very important institution. I’ve invested a ton of time into it. I believe what we’re doing is special,” Berg says, “and I won’t let them screw it up.”
“An Evening with Michael Berg: Celebrating a Lifetime of Service” takes place September 26 from 5–9pm at Diamond Mills Resort & Spa in Saugerties. Tickets are $175; tables of 10 are $1,575. Information and tickets are available at Fowinc.org
