It, of course, takes helping victims and their families. But it also requires awareness — of the organization and its services, and the male role in the equation.
Project Woman gives emergency shelter and services to support people experiencing domestic violence, intimate partner violence or sexual violence. Its goal is to help people toward recovery and safety, with an emphasis on safety. To do this, Project Woman offers many services to the community, including a 24-hour crisis line and an emergency shelter program.
“I feel Project Woman is a place where women can go and feel safe and have help making a plan, a plan for what they’re going to do when they leave the shelter because you can only stay in the shelter for a certain amount of time,” said Leanne Wierenga, who has been helped by Project Woman and is now giving back by serving on its board of directors.
Wierenga also said that she worries that some members of the community, especially the Spanish speakers, have no idea what Project Woman is. She said that after some of Project Woman’s brochures were translated into Spanish this summer, several Spanish-speaking women have come to the shelter.
“It’s hard to know who knows what Project Woman stands for,” Wierenga said. “The kind of circles I move in, people know. But outside in the community, it’s hard to know.”
Baxter said that the issue of domestic violence has been and still is called a woman’s issue, but it’s more than that.
“Men need to come up beside this issue and help own it, share it with us,” Baxter said.
At Thursday’s candlelight vigil, Eli Williams, director of Fatherhood Clark County, talked about how men fit into this issue.
“Men have a crucial role in preventing violence against women,” Williams said. “It starts with mature and responsible men modeling for younger men, their own children and others, what it is to be a man.”
Williams applauded Project Woman for its 40 years of serving the community but asked why should women be in this fight against violence alone?
“This is a male issue,” Williams said. “And it starts with individual men making the choice to be non-violent.”
Baxter also presented the Chrysalis Award, an award celebrating someone who personifies the journey, the courage, the hope and the life of a survivor. This year, Naureen Qasim, associate professor of health and human services at Clark State Community College, received the award.
Qasim grew up in Pakistan but came to Springfield with her two children to get away from an abusive husband, she said.
“When your spirit is broken, you forget that you were a human being at one point,” Qasim said, “especially when you’re 24 years old and you have two kids who are watching you get beat up every day.”
Qasim still faced troubles here, but a neighbor in Springfield took her to Project Woman. Qasim lived in the shelter and was one of the first people that Project Woman served in its transitional housing program, Baxter said. That transitional housing program helped Qasim find permanent housing.
“They were very warm, very comforting, kind, very supportive and gave lots and lots of hugs,” Qasim said. “It was a very wonderful healing experience because I was scared of trusting anyone. Because you have been hurt so many times, you don’t know who to trust.”
Baxter says supporting people like Qasim remains Project Woman’s main focus as it looks to the future.
“Our goal is to work at the level of community education to promote social change so that violence is not a normalized approach to communication within the family, within intimate partners for men and women,” she said. “That level, the social change level, is a priority for the organization going forward.
“I guess another way to put is that in the big picture, prevention and education has to be a priority so that we’re being proactive vs reactive,” she continued. “The shelter will always be there, it’s a core, it’s an essential service and it’s necessary for those fleeing violence. But that should not be … only reactive.”
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