The hours are unpredictable, the pay low and you’re working from crisis to crisis. Welcome to the life of a crisis peer support specialist, a new city-supported position run through the nonprofit Focused Interruption Coalition.

While FIC had been providing peer support before the city contracted with its partner, the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development, starting last year, “much of it was volunteer and sometimes not at the level necessary due to time and job constraints,” said FIC assistant executive director Zandra Hagberg, who often handles dispatching duties and works with female clients. “Now, this is a job and we can focus more time to those who need us most.”

For a time, Anthony Cooper fell to the temptation of easy money in the drug trade that plagued Madison’s pockets of poverty in the mid-1990s.

Cooper, raised with one of his sisters by a single mother, grew up in a decent, diverse neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side where he delivered fliers and got other jobs at a young age. “I was kind of trying to pay my mother respect and trying to help my sister and my family,” he said.

Life started well for Jerome Dillard.

Born on Chicago’s South Side, Dillard and his two younger sisters were raised by a mother who worked in a factory, a stepfather employed at a steel mill, a grandfather who was a self-taught locksmith and grandmother who was a domestic worker.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Aaron Hicks turned 18 behind bars, was later sent to prison three months after his daughter was born and released when she was nearly 13, and must wear a GPS ankle bracelet for the rest of his life.

Those parts of his life now seem all but preordained.