Innovative Shelter Offers Women Many Services Under One Roof

The staff and board members of Interact of Wake County, in Raleigh, N.C., an 18-bed shelter for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, were tired of turning away so many women who needed the charity’s help.

The charity couldn’t keep up as the county’s population grew by more than 60 percent over the two decades since it opened. For every woman whom Interact of Wake County was able to serve in 2006, for example, it had to send another to a hotel or social-service program in another county.

But along with expanding its capacity to house clients, Interact also wanted to sharply expand the scope of its programs.

Adam Hartzell, the group’s executive director, says the need to do more than provide a shelter was obvious. “It’s very rare that anyone comes into our program and her only issue is domestic violence,” he says.

In most cases, the reasons a woman cannot leave a violent partner are complicated — often involving drug or alcohol addiction and mental-health problems, as well as lack of financial and legal skills, good child care, or low-cost housing options.

Unless women get help dealing with those other issues, Mr. Hartzell says, they are likely to return to their abusers.

In addition to doing a better job of sheltering abused women, Interact was looking to improve services to the nearly 6,500 adults and 7,500 children it helps in its treatment and counseling programs.

So the charity devised a new effort to bring together all the services its clients need. The project will ultimately result in a 55,000-square-foot, “one-stop shop” to enable its clients to seek aid from police officers, substance-abuse counselors, legal-aid lawyers, child-care professionals, doctors and nurses, vocational trainers, and a host of other providers under one roof. The 45-bed facility is expected to open in March.

Interact’s experience of gathering so many disparate service providers — a step beyond the two-party collaborations that several other domestic-violence charities have engaged in — represents a model that may interest other organizations that serve women and children in need.

“They’ve got a very innovative collaboration to pull together all these different resources that their population needs,” says Elizabeth Finnerty, president of Skyland Trail, a nonprofit mental- and medical-health provider in Atlanta that was one of several programs Interact representatives visited during its research. “I applaud them for being so comprehensive in their thought process.”

Joining Forces

Numerous organizations already offered services to help people cope with the practical and emotional issues faced by Interact’s clients, Mr. Hartzell says, so the shelter had no desire to step outside of its own expertise in helping women in the immediate aftermath of an episode of abuse.

So, with the support of a three-year $360,000 grant from the John Rex Endowment, in Raleigh, Interact formed a committee — including representatives from the charity and from other local social-service groups, government officials, volunteers, and a former shelter resident — to conduct research on the possibility of a large-scale collaboration and to design ways for the groups to work together to provide services.

Kevin Cain, president of the John Rex Endowment, says its grant represented an extension of the endowment’s mission to expand health-care access to needy children. Mothers who are domestic-violence victims often require additional support to help them handle the medical and mental-health needs of their children, Mr. Cain says, while health-care providers often require specialized training to help screen for and treat the effects of family violence. Dealing with those realities was a goal of the collaboration.

Members of Interact’s advisory committee visited a dozen other charities around North Carolina as well as in cities including Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., Boston, Minneapolis, and San Diego. In several of those cities, domestic-violence shelters had formed partnerships with providers of substance-abuse counseling or mental-health services, says Mr. Hartzell.

Visiting those cities “opened our eyes to all the different possibilities and was very informative,” Mr. Hartzell says, adding, “People were very honest with us about things they tried but wouldn’t do again.”

For example, the Tubman Family Alliance, a domestic-violence shelter in Minneapolis, had attempted to operate its own day-care program but had run into insurmountable licensing and staffing problems, Mr. Hartzell says. That helped Interact decide to stay out of the day-care business and instead make a deal with the YMCA of the Greater Triangle to move its existing child-care program into Interact’s new facility when it opens next year.

Back on its home turf, Interact got busy working out agreements with the groups that would provide services to its clients, Mr. Hartzell says. To date, Interact has signed agreements with Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, Legal Aid of North Carolina, Wake Health Services, and both the YMCA and YWCA of the Greater Triangle, all in Raleigh.

Police Presence

One of the most innovative features of Interact’s new location is that the Raleigh Police Department will house its entire family-violence unit there.

Dawn Bryant, the police department’s lawyer, says the decision came after the department spent a long time seeking ways to improve its service.

Government and private grants that the department received in the past decade enabled the department to form a separate family-violence unit, with officers specially trained to investigate such cases, as well as in-house crisis counselors, victim advocates, and psychologists, Ms. Bryant says.

These efforts are all designed to break the cycle of violence, both for victims of domestic abuse whose lives are in danger and for their children, whose exposure to violence in the home makes them more likely to engage in criminal behavior, she says.

“We are all learning that we need not to let families fall through the cracks,” Ms. Bryant says. “We’ve come a long way, but we also understand that there are still gaps, and so many opportunities to lose people along the way. For instance, a police officer can respond to a call for service, can arrest the abuser, and provide legal information to the victim. But it’s hard for some victims to take that information and find the wherewithal to get that help.”

At the new Interact facility, police officers will be able to recommend the services of the crisis counselors, health-care providers, or legal-aid lawyers right under the same roof — albeit through separate, private entryways.

It will be entirely possible, Ms. Bryant says, for someone to make use of Interact’s counselors or Wake Health Services’ medical providers, for example, but entirely bypass the police department — or vice versa.

The single location of all those service providers will help streamline certain typical procedures in domestic-violence cases, says Mr. Hartzell. In a crisis situation, he says, a client should be able to talk with a counselor, work with a lawyer who can get a court order to protect the abused woman, and receive a police escort back home to collect personal items, all within a few hours.

Visible New Location

The new Interact of Wake County will be housed in a former facility of the YWCA of the Greater Triangle. The building, which was constructed in the 1970s, was nearly sold to developers and turned into condominiums — a possibility that did not sit well with many longtime local YWCA members and supporters, according to Mr. Hartzell.

“Initially, when I heard the building was up for sale, and saw its remarkable location and size, I didn’t think it would be possible because it was so far out of our price range,” he says

But the YWCA ultimately decided to sell the facility to Interact at the below-market price of $3.8-million, Mr. Harzell says. “They saw the sale as an extension of part of their mission to empower women,” he says. In exchange for the price break, the YWCA will receive a rent-free 1,000-square-foot space in the building, where it will operate various women’s programs, including financial counseling, health screenings, and obesity prevention.

Additionally, Mr. Hartzell notes, the YWCA was crucial in connecting Interact with the local YMCA, which has signed a seven-year lease for nearly one-third of the building’s space, where it will run its traditional day-care, after-school, and summer-camp programs for both the general public and for Interact’s clients. “That rental income is in part what convinced the bank to lend us the money to purchase the building,” says Mr. Hartzell.

To pay for the building’s rehabilitation, Interact started a capital campaign that has raised $3-million of an anticipated $5-million, including $300,000 from the City of Raleigh; $150,000 from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, in Winston-Salem, N.C.; and $50,000 from the Redwoods Group, an insurance company in Morrisville, N.C.

Mr. Hartzell says the central location of the new facility has helped woo donors. “What we saw when we visited other locations is that as cities grow and expand, a lot of services are getting pushed out,” and relocated in cheaper, less-accessible, or economically struggling neighborhoods, he says. “We’re fortunate that we’re not stuck in the warehouse district,” he says. “The facility has a community history, and that’s helping our project and removing the cloak of secrecy from the issue.”

While raising the visibility of the services that Interact and other charities and government agencies provide to abused women has been crucial to garnering public support, Mr. Hartzell echoes Ms. Bryant’s point about the importance of maintaining the privacy of its clients.

The new building will employ several layers of security, including pass-card systems and private security guards, he says. He also noted that while all other Interact services will be available and visible at the new building, the location of the 45-bed residential shelter will remain undisclosed and off-limits to casual visitors.

The very structure of the new facility, with its separate entranceways for different providers, will help ensure that clients feel both protected and in charge of their lives, he says. The building will include a thrift store that is open to the public — and can provide a “cover story” for potential clients who are considering using Interact’s other services, or current clients who don’t want anybody to know they are seeking to escape abuse, he says.

“Our whole philosophy is to operate off a model of empowerment,” says Mr. Hartzell. “We don’t do things for people, we try to teach people how to do things for themselves. While our clients are coming in for services from us we are also eliminating the access barriers and giving them all the tools they need to be successful.”