January 14, 1999 | Read Time: 4 minutes
As a youngster, Meredith Blake had never heard of the term “domestic violence.” But she was nevertheless familiar with it.
ALSO SEE:
Information on Break the Cycle
How the Next Generation Is Shaping the Non-Profit World: Profiles on 10 Young Leaders
When she was 14, she was in an emotionally and verbally abusive relationship with a boyfriend that she ended after it turned violent. Ms. Blake says it wasn’t until she enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley and talked to people who had had similar experiences that she learned the label for what she had gone through.
She also came to realize that domestic violence was a part of life for countless individuals from the time they were very young — and that very few resources were available to teach young people how to avoid abuse.
To turn that situation around, Ms. Blake, now 28, decided to found and run Break the Cycle, a non-profit organization in Santa Monica, Cal. The charity educates people aged 12 to 22 about domestic violence, teaches them about their legal rights in case they ever suffer from such abuse, and offers young people who already need legal help a place to turn.
Ms. Blake says the name of the charity reflects the effort to break the cycle of domestic violence by making sure adolescents know what is improper and illegal behavior and also know that they don’t have to tolerate abuse — lessons that she says are easier learned in the formative years.
Ms. Blake’s focus on teaching people how to avoid physical and emotional abuse comes in part from her frustration as a volunteer at a legal-aid clinic. When she helped women obtain restraining orders against their batterers, she was required to ask each woman when the abuse began. Many replied, “Do you mean now, or when it first began in my life?” Ms. Blake says she was stunned by how frequently that happened.
“It was very clear to me that this is something that starts much younger,” Ms. Blake says. “Not when you’re a 30-, 40-, or 50-year-old woman, but when you’re a 13-, 14-, or 15-year-old child.”
Ms. Blake became concerned about how much emphasis the charities that she encountered placed on helping people who had already been abused — instead of putting more energy into preventing the abuse.
“What good,” she wondered, “is all the work we were doing if we weren’t also doing prevention work to make sure kids never become clients in the future?”
Initially, Ms. Blake sought to solve that problem by asking organizations that already dealt with domestic violence to create programs specifically for young people.
But few charities she spoke to were interested in starting new programs aimed at youngsters. Those that were willing to explore the possibility attached “strings,” she says.
“I recognized that I wasn’t going to have the freedom to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish.”
She adds: “The loss of my own voice was too much of a risk to take.”
So after graduating from the University of California at Los Angeles law school in 1995, she started her own charity. To raise money for Break the Cycle, she wrote a letter to everyone she had known since childhood asking for support. She raised $30,000 in small contributions from that appeal, which was enough to move the organization out of her apartment and into office space.
Today, Break the Cycle has four employees and an annual operating budget of $400,000.
More than 4,000 boys and girls have participated in the charity’s workshops that teach techniques for avoiding abuse. The list of schools that want to run a workshop for their students is so long that Ms. Blake has started recruiting Los Angeles lawyers to donate their time to help her offer more classes.
In addition, with the help of law students and lawyers who volunteer their time, Break the Cycle has advised, counseled, or represented hundreds of domestic-violence victims across the country.
This year, Ms. Blake plans to hire a mental-health professional to provide domestic-violence counseling to young people and link youngsters with adults who can serve as role models.
She also expects to hire a fund raiser. Ms. Blake says that she is exploring corporate marketing deals and other entrepreneurial ventures that will not only raise money but that will also call attention to the problem of domestic abuse among young people. Ms. Blake says she is not looking for one-time ventures, but for efforts that will be able to generate revenue continuously.
Thinking ahead is of key importance for Ms. Blake. She contends that her long-range thinking — and that of her peers — separates today’s young leaders from the activists of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“Twenty years ago you had an incredibly energetic group of young people committed to making a difference and doing the work, but they weren’t necessarily looking 20 years ahead of them,” Ms. Blake says. “There was a big burst of momentum and activism that wasn’t sustainable because there was no long-term planning or vision involved.”
“I don’t think we’re ever going to completely eradicate domestic violence,” she says frankly. “I spend as much of my time thinking about the future and planning ahead five years from now as five months from now.”
