Carrie Leeson was running her own business and was already a Lifeline telephone volunteer, but had not ventured to the warehouse at Mitchell before being appointed CEO.

"When I imagined it, I didn't see it being as big an operation with as many volunteers involved,” she says. “The systems in place and the efficiency blew me away, I was absolutely humbled.”

Around 300 volunteers sort and price 200,000 books for each of the two main bookfairs held at EPIC in Spring and Autumn, plus a smaller number for the Winter bookfair at Tuggeranong.

Leeson is impressed with the attention given to the second hand books donated for the bookfairs.

“Every single book coming through is handled with so much care, the books come in, they go to the initial sorting, they are wiped down, they're really cared for - so much love is put back into these books before they go back out to the bookfair.

"That's something that really impressed me when I first walked in, I was so humbled first and foremost by the fact this operation is run on the backs of hard-working dedicated volunteers.

"The Canberra community is supporting us by donating those books and the books just keep coming.

"You think people are going to stop reading books or switch to Kindle but there are now more books being published than ever before.

"So the books keep coming, the volunteers keep turning out, putting in all those hours, making it happen.”

Leeson takes over the helm from Mike Zissler just as the bookfairs crack the million dollar mark in annual takings.

While the bookfairs are the public face of Lifeline, their purpose is to cover the cost of keeping the telephone lines open to people in crisis.

"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 to train them up to the point where they can take the calls and deal with individuals and assist them in their crisis.

"So while a million dollars is a great amount of money, we put it to good use but we're still living hand to mouth.”

Canberra Lifeline is the nation’s highest performing telephone counselling service, but is aiming to answer even more calls, following the enlargement of the phone room to eight lines.

The 300 telephone volunteers (including some who sort books) answered 30,457 calls in the last financial year, a 17 per cent increase, and an average of 85 calls a day.

"We received some government funding to refurbish the phone room and put in the two extra seats and that facility now enables us to put more bums on seats and have more people on the phones,” Leeson says.

"But we don't get to 100 per cent of the callers - we get to 85 per cent, so the need is growing.

“Unfortunately, I think we've got increasing isolation, increasing mental health issues and therefore a need for our service.

"Also we don't discuss as well as we should the issues around suicide prevention.

"We are trying to get to the point where people are comfortable talking about suicide in such a way that it will lead people to seek assistance, to remove that taboo, to remove the stigma and to try to encourage individuals to engage more with the community.”

Leeson works on the phones so she knows first-hand the challenges of dealing with callers in distress and what the organisation is achieving.

“The callers are either in the process of completing suicide or in absolute crisis,” she says.

"You often wonder, if you weren’t there to take that call, what would that individual be facing without the support of us on the phones, complete strangers, and they having no one else to turn to, what would become of that individual?

“You dread to think - that’s what keeps me coming back to the phones every time.

"It's incredibly hard work for volunteers, we're not sausage turners on a Saturday.

“You have to develop the skill and the capacity to hear what you've got hear, to then turn around and assist the individual in relieving their distress and helping them to focus and move on to their next task.

"You try to promote that self care to get them to the point where they're going to move on and seek more help.

“So it's really important for us to acknowledge those people on the phones, it takes a lot of inner strength to be able to do that.”

Leeson says her experience with her former husband suffering depression – the Brumbies’ Clyde Rathbone - was not a factor in her joining Lifeline.

“My career path to date has been the result of a combination of strategy and hard work, with experiences in my personal life only making me more empathetic and resilient,” she says.

Rathbone made a public apology to her in 2012 and said he’d suffered depression all his life after childhood abuse.

To overcome Lifeline’s hand-to-mouth existence, Leeson has plans to make the organisation economically sustainable.

Last year it made three positions redundant, including the bookfair warehouse manager, to save $200,000 a year and shore up its cash reserves for the long term.

A decision was taken before Leeson's 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.

One funding priority is finding a regular weekly gig for the Bean Talkin’ coffee wagon.

“I come from the private sector, I had a business in preventative health, so I think the appeal for the board was to bring in someone who can generate the additional revenue streams we need to create to prevent that hand to mouth set up we've got at the moment,” Leeson says.

“We need to create a sustainable revenue stream outside of the bookfair and that is my main goal.”

The writer is a Lifeline volunteer. Facebook/RossPeake