New chief executive Carrie Leeson said the organisation cannot continue its “hand-to-mouth” existence despite raising $1 million in a year for the first time from its book fairs.

“We offer a suite of mental health training programs such as dealing with people and difficult situations, what we're hoping to do is to commercialise that training,” she said.

“If you look at stress in the workplace for example, a lot of employers are looking for ways to make their staff more resilient and this is what our courses do.

“They enable individuals to develop a resilience, to open up appropriate lines of communication between colleagues, to try and monitor the dynamic in the workplace and to help colleagues in crisis.

“Canberra businesses have a number of redundancies taking place, we’ve got people losing their jobs and having to leave Canberra so it’s important to be able to empower the community to assist those around them.”

Canberra Lifeline is the nation’s highest performing telephone counselling service, taking 30,000 calls last financial year, a 17 per cent increase.

However, despite expanding recently to eight phone lines, the volunteers are able to answer only about 85 per cent of the calls, and the number of callers continues to grow.

A decision was taken before her appointment to close the Hipsley Lane vintage clothing store in September due to poor sales.

Earlier this year Lifeline Canberra brought Angry Anderson on board as the face of its campaign to raise $1 million which will be invested and only the dividends used.

Ms Leeson said it was stressful for the organisation to live hand-to-mouth.

“So my focus is to make Lifeline more sustainable,” she said.

"A million dollars is a large amount of money but unfortunately it costs us more than that to stay on the phones, to be there for callers, to literally save lives,” she says.

“It costs us around $8000 per volunteer per year to train them up to the point where they can take the calls and deal with individuals and assist them in their crisis.”