@GRASSROOTS.ORG/Abused Adult Resource Center

Wednesday, Jul 23, 2008

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Abused Adult Resource Center

Abused Adult Resource Center
Diane Zainhofsky, Program Director
Box 167
Bismarck, N.D. 58502
(701) 222-8370

One of the causes of poverty that doesn't get much attention is that of battered and abused women, women who typically find themselves on the street after leaving an abusive husband or boyfriend, literally with no possessions other than the clothes on their backs.

There's hardly a better model, however, than Bismarck's Abused Adult Resource Center, a well-run and caring organization that got its start in the early 1970s as the dream of a task force of people who saw a problem and no community program to deal with it. Initially, it operated as the Abused Women's Resource Closet, a half-joking reference to the size of its storefront headquarters. Its primary function was to provide a safe place for abused women to go, and it did that through a non-traditional and creative approach: Volunteers made space available in their homes as "safe houses" available whenever there was a need.

Even today, when the center owns and operates an exemplary 20-bed shelter in a large frame house that it purchased and renovated three years ago just south of downtown Bismarck, the Safe Houses still operate -- 25 of them -- as a stopgap and emergency haven for women who find themselves and their children on the street without notice at night.

But the Abused Adult Resource Center offers more than just housing. As Zainhofsky says, it operates from the premise that people have a right to relationships in which they don't have to be afraid. Toward that end, the center has evolved a complete array of shelter, protection, education and counseling programs aimed not only at caring for battered women but helping them gain self-esteem AND their legal rights . . . but also to intervene with education programs to prevent abuse before it happens, and even, with a new program that it hopes to institute this autumn, a creative effort to turn around battering spouses as well. (Working with Barbara Hart of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an expert in the field, the group hopes to hire a counselor to work with battering spouses, who would be directed to the program by the court . . . and instructed to pay the costs of their therapy, making the program self-supporting.)

Operating with a staff of 12 full-time workers (including five licensed social workers), four part-timers and more than 100 volunteers on a $400,000 annual budget, the Center's program breaks into four main areas:

Safe Shelter, incorporating both the 20-bed shelter house and the Safe Houses. Women and their children are assigned bright, neat rooms and participate in daily living activities that walk a tightrope between giving them freedom and a sense of empowerment and maintaining order in a community-living situation. So, for instance, they are free to come and go to work and errands, but are expected to be in by 7 p.m. so they can share time together and "bond" during the evenings. Women share chores, participate in weekly group sessions, and work with an assigned case worker to set and work toward accomplishing specific goals. The typical resident stays six to eight weeks, and when she leaves for permanent housing, takes with her baskets of groceries and essentials, all donated by local churches and civic groups, to help her get started.

Criminal-Justice program, in which a trained worker helps women, as appropriate, complete the paperwork and filing required to obtain protective orders directing the abusive partner to leave her and the children alone. This program also works closely with local police, to ensure that they understand the issues of domestic violence and enforce current laws and regulations regarding warrants and protective orders.

Children's and Adolescents' programs, ranging from "good touch, bad touch, our kids need to know" classes for second-graders to dating-violence presentations for teens in area high schools., as well as counseling sessions for youngsters in families in the shelter.

Crisis Intervention. Center workers and volunteers staff a hotline 24 hours, seven days a week, with a WATS number (800-472-2911) for women to call if they have a problem. In Bismarck, workers will go out immediately to meet women and take them to safe shelters; callers from elsewhere in South Dakota are referred instantly to local programs.

Over the past three years, the Center has sheltered 50 to 70 families a year, and served up to 18,000 meals, primarily with food from local donations and the Fargo Food Bank. Although the vast majority are women, cases of abused men are not unknown, and the Center helps them, too. Roughly half of the residents are American Indians, largely from the nearby Standing Rock Reservation at Fort Yates. But those are numbers, and as compelling as they are, they don't tell the story that one of the Center's promotional posters tells. A childish stick figure of a woman with a mottled face, it bears this legend: "Listen to the children. A four-year-old girl drew this picture of a woman with a black eye. She describes her picture with mature awareness of domestic violence: 'This is what happens to mommy when daddy is angry.'"

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.
Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.
Send him E-mail.
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