YWCA shelter feels budget squeeze
With funds delayed, cut, home for abused women and children faces temporary closure
-A resident of a safe house for battered women in Santa Rosa sips coffee, Thursday September 11, 2008.
Kent Porter / The Press DemocratPublished: Monday, September 15, 2008 at 5:53 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, September 15, 2008 at 5:56 a.m.
The delay of legislators and the governor in passing a state budget is putting a hard squeeze on this three-story home in Santa Rosa.
It’s a place that doesn’t need any more pressure.
Run by the YWCA of Sonoma County, the house is shielded by a sophisticated security system and filled with almost two dozen women and their children who fled violence and abuse for safe shelter.
“These women have nowhere else to go,” said Denise Frey, the YWCA’s executive director. “These are the cases that are the most dangerous. It’s not safe for them to stay with family, it’s not safe for them to stay with friends, they don’t have the financial resources to move.”
Legislative leaders announced a budget compromise Sunday, but as their record impasse dragged on, the safe house has been in an increasingly desperate scramble to survive.
Without money from the state, the house faces temporary closure Oct. 1, as do programs that support women once they move out.
State funds provide $60,000 a month to the safe house program, about 80 percent of the annual operating budget. That money stopped flowing July 1 when the state entered the new fiscal year with Republicans and Democrats a budget standoff. The delay also has meant $50,000 owed by the state from last year hasn’t been delivered.
As a result, the YWCA has spent almost $200,000 from its cash reserves and credit lines.
The funding gap occurred at the same time as a 10 percent cut in funding imposed by the state.
“We’re pretty much at the point where the cash reserves have been used,” said Renee Amochaev, a YWCA board member and head of its finance committee.
She said last week that state lawmakers have told them to prepare for further cuts after a budget passes.
Few details of the latest budget deal were released Sunday, but it reportedly involves $9 billion in spending cuts.
The YWCA already has pared expenses and laid off three employees.
“There wouldn’t be any other place in this county that has the expertise or the security to put these women,” said Jennifer Lake, the YWCA director of program services for 12 years.
The safe house is the keystone of efforts to combat domestic violence and assist its victims, which also include men. Late last week, 17 of the house’s 23 available spaces were taken.
The house opened in 1976, and is the only such service in Sonoma County.
In late-morning sunshine last week, Mary, a blue-eyed, 31-year-old woman with long, black hair, sat at a picnic bench in the garden.
Nearby sat an older woman in a leg cast — her injury caused by the partner she fled. Another resident was a pregnant woman whose boyfriend had stabbed her. A tow-headed boy lay on a couch with tiger-striped pillows.
Mary, who recently graduated from Empire College’s medical assistant program, arrived in Santa Rosa in December 2006 after a four-day Greyhound ride from the East Coast. The father of her son had turned on her, she said, confining her at home, taking her car and house keys, locking her out, taking their son and refusing to bring him home.
After a month in a domestic violence shelter there, with the Sonoma County YWCA’s telephone number in hand, she headed back to Santa Rosa, where she had lived before. It was the time when she was at greatest risk, statistics suggest.
One-third of female homicide victims are killed by partners, the FBI says. A California Women’s Law Center survey of women killed by their partners between 1998 and 2002 found that 45 percent of victims had recently separated or were in the process of doing so, and 14 percent were killed within a month of leaving.
When Mary arrived in Santa Rosa, a friend took her to the police department, and from there, a YWCA advocate escorted her to the safe house.
“I went to bed, and I was crying,” said Mary, whose last name is being withheld. “I woke up and I was crying, and someone tells you you’re safe and I knew I was.”
Mary left the house after 90 days. Since, she has been able to use YWCA counseling and advocacy services, known as the Adobe Program. It assists clients for two years with housing searches, budgeting classes, therapy, child care and legal assistance.
Those services are among those that face closure Oct. 1, Frey said.
Already, the YWCA has laid off two counselors and an outreach advocate who works with children. Board members are preparing to enroll in the 40-hour volunteer training course that the state requires of all people who work in the safe house.
On a second-floor stairway landing in the house, Frey turned to Lake and recalled earlier days in the campaign to protect women from violence.
“We’ll go back to when we were starting out,” she said, “take them back to our homes.”
Lake, who 30 years ago in Sonoma County helped in what she termed “underground services” sheltering battered women in private homes, said: “We can’t do that anymore.”
“But we’d be tempted,” Frey said.
“We’d be tempted,” Lake said.
“Come hell or high water,” Amochaev said, “we’ll do what we need to do to keep the safe house open.”
You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com
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