Dealing With the Onslaught
Every morning, like clockwork, a police car pulls up in front of the House Of Ruth Maryland. With the engine left idling, an officer jumps out and runs up the steps, rings the bell and hands off a stack of lethality assessments, reports that indicate the most serious domestic violence incidents that happened in the Northern and Northeastern Districts during the previous 24 hours.
Based on a set of questions developed to pinpoint victims most at risk, these reports notify the House Of Ruth about women who are in dangerous situations, but might not necessarily ask for help. Once they arrive, Miss Mary walks the stack upstairs to the Contact Center, where a specially assigned staff person begins placing calls to each of the victims noted in the reports.
The goal of the program, a pilot program in Baltimore City, is to both inform victims of services they may not be aware of and facilitate those connections before their situation becomes life threatening. Whether those services are as drastic as shelter or as simple as offering advice on how to develop a safety plan, research shows that the sooner a victim is connected with services, the better chance there is of saving her life.
However, when you combine this new effort to “reach out” with a 29% increase in incoming hotline calls, a shelter filled to capacity and mounting referrals coming from counties whose programs have been forced to close, it puts a noticeable strain on the staff and resources available.
How can you continue to reach and help more victims when you can’t afford to add staff? How do you even begin to combat a rising tide of violence when funding hasn’t kept pace? Those are the questions that the House Of Ruth Maryland has been grappling with since 2008, and on February 1st, Phase Three of the answer was put into place.
To truly understand its significance, you have to understand the evolution that’s taken place over the past year. First, in February of 2009, the Contact Center was unveiled which turned a volunteer-staffed hotline into a fully functioning “help” center staffed with trained counselors and volunteer advocates who could connect victims with the necessary services on the spot. It required no extra outlay of cash, but did depend on each department volunteering to cover at least one shift per week. This past fall, that unveiling was followed by a major reorganization of the shelter program– a move designed to make the shelter experience more welcoming and healing for the families who live there, while eliminating duplication and fragmenting of services.
Those actions set the stage for Phase Three. Consolidate the agency’s case managers and community advocates into one Client Services Department in order to offer victims a dedicated person who knows their individual circumstances and needs, and can help guide them through the process of rebuilding their lives. In addition to coordinating any House Of Ruth services they receive such as shelter, counseling or legal help, the Client Services Coordinator can also link victims to outside services that run the gamut from housing to child care to job training. And since domestic violence knows no boundaries, the new department collectively speaks French, Italian, Spanish, Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) and Russian as well as English.
For the House Of Ruth Maryland, it has been a year of great change. It has also been a year of realization. Funding hasn’t kept pace with the need so the onus is on us to find smarter, more efficient ways of helping the women and children who depend on us for their safety and their lives. The alternative is too frightening to even consider. Imagine having to tell a woman who calls terrified for her or her children’s lives, “Sorry, but you’ll have to call us back when the recession is over.”
