A Safe Place to honor founders at 20th anniversary celebration
BY MARY LANCASTERE INDEPENDENT WRITER
Next month A Safe Place will hold a special party to honor its founders with balloons, hors d'oeuvres and wine toasts as the agency officially celebrates its 20th anniversary.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Four of the original five female island attorneys who founded A Safe Place 20 years ago will be honored at a celebration on Oct. 14. From left is Julie Fitzgerald, Rhoda Weinman, Melissa Philbrick and Sarah Alger.

While plans for the occasion may be festive, there is nothing joyous about the reason why the island's five female attorneys who formed the first Nantucket Women's Bar Association chose to create A Safe Place as their primary mission.

In October 1986, attorneys Rhoda Weinman, Sarah Alger, Julie Fitzgerald, Melissa Philbrick and Sara Greenburg, the only one of the group no longer on the island, began the local Women's Bar Association, recognizing a growing and crucial need for a center dealing with domestic violence and sexual assault because the numbers of such incidences were increasing at what Weinman termed at the time a "frightening" rate.

In March 1987, after the lawyers hosted a standing room only public forum to discuss ways to set up a crisis hotline and programs to protect island victims, ASafe Place, equipped with one telephone, opened in a small room of Landmark House. Volunteers expanded from a few at first, to the many who were trained to staff a 24-hour hotline as patient and guiding listeners, allowing callers to make their own decisions about their relationships while offering information and presenting options about the issue of domestic violence.

Since then, A Safe Place has introduced programs that include domestic violence and sexual assault prevention and survivor services; crisis intervention and counseling; advocacy involving police; medical needs; in the courts, an agency-based supervised visitation program for non-custodial parents; school education and counseling programs; a network of safe homes for urgent shortterm protection of victims and their children and new services that have just begun or are about to start. A Safe Place has evolved significantly from its original grass-roots approach, noted Fitzgerald, who was one of the early hotline volunteers and with her colleagues saw the necessity of a domestic violence support system for Nantucket.

"It was fairly soon after I came to the island, but clearly it was a question of needing a safe house environment where people could find a place to go or call and the only thing that was available was on the Cape," said Philbrick. "The initial idea was to set up a hotline and a network of volunteers and that grew into the multi-faceted organization it is now. It has been a really valuable asset to the community."

"We were all feeling new here when we started it, but I found a number of people who came to me who were dealing with domestic violence and sexual abuse, and counseling and court advocacy didn't exist here," Weinman said. "We decided we needed a public forum and there was an overwhelming number of people there. After that, people called me and said what a great thing it was and that they wanted to be involved. There was definitely a need in the community and it wasn't being addressed.

"We did struggle with the safe homes," she said. "Nothing on Nantucket is a secret. A few people volunteered their homes but everybody knows everyone's cars, so that was hard. Nobody thinks [domestic violence] happens here, but it's everywhere. So many people who were part of the organization had their own experiences and wanted to help others. I think we're reallly proud of what it's turned into today."

Domestic violence and sexual assault have always been under reported due to factors including victims' fear, shame, misunderstanding of their situations or perceived guilt in causing verbal or physical attacks, but recent statistics reveal that in the year spanning July 2006 through June 2007, A Safe Place was contacted 1,921 times. Hotline calls for domestic violence numbered 161 and there were 25 calls about sexual assault. There were 224 total hotline calls. In that same period there were 59 crisis responses, 77 court contacts because of domestic violence, 949 individual and family sessions with 28 emergency counseling sessions and 148 relating to battering/partner vio- lence and 12 families enrolled in supervised visits.

Clients totaled 522 with 152 for battering/partner violence and 12 for sexual assault. Of the total clients, 335 were children and adolescents, 174 were women and 21 were men. From June through August 2006 the agency made 14 after-hours responses at the police station or hospital for domestic violence and four for sexual assault, compared with the same three months in 2007 when domestic violence responses numbered 28 and sexual assaults totaled five. Agency staff has developed from its initial core of volunteers to four full-time and three part-time employees today.

Just two weeks ago, A Safe Place opened its own emergency food pantry with goods and funds given by patrons at Stop & Shop. Noting that the island's general population food pantry is excellent, the agency's interim executive director Patricia Kelleher said when a victim needs to leave Nantucket quickly for a safe home on the Cape the pantry allows A Safe Place to send that person off with necessary groceries. At the same time, A Safe Place conducted a drive at Stop & Shop to collect school supplies for children of victims who may be in financial need. Currently, Nantucket Office Products on Pleasant Street is collecting school supply donations.

In two weeks other new programs will begin, including the Nantucket Basket Project and the Beacon Project. Small Nantucket baskets have been given to the agency that will be placed in restaurant restrooms and in local stores. The baskets will contain cards tiny enough to be slipped into a shoe or purse that list vital emergency phone numbers for those experiencing domestic or sexual abuse. The cards will be printed in English and Spanish.

The Beacon Project is a collaboration between A Safe Place and the Nantucket Police Department who jointly designed an envelope to hold a letter explaining how victims can be immediately connected with services for family violence. When officers are called to the scene of potential domestic issues they will leave that information with the caller and then follow up the next day utilizing a civilian police advocate to ensure the potential victim is safe from harm.

"Chief William Pittman has been very supportive of A Safe Place," said Barbara Halsted, president of the agency's board of directors. "His officers are called to domestic violence instances more than to any other call."

Although all the agency's programs are needed and sought out by clients, its prevention and education programs are considered vital in teaching the warning signs of abuse and helping to keep children, often witnesses to violence if not victims themselves, from perpetuating the cycle as adult abusers or victims.

"It is always going to be important to provide support for victims of domestic abuse, but it is as or even more important to provide prevention programs and education to break the cycle of domestic violence," said Kat Robinson Grieder, the agency's Associate Executive Director.

For attorney Sarah Alger, the upcoming event is bittersweet.

"It's so nice to be able to be celebrating 20 years, but it's so sad that there is a need for the organization and that it's doing so well," said Alger. "I never knew how much it was going to grow and I certainly see it continuing to grow. As a community we are really fortunate to have A Safe Place here. Rhoda likes to call us the founding mothers, and as a metaphor, as a mother, it's nice to watch a child grow up and going places on its own and doing things you didn't necessarily foresee but would have wished for.

"At first people said we were really brave and that it was bad for tourism and shouldn't be in the newspaper," Alger added. "Domestic violence was very much not talked about, so to see these women show up at [the first] meeting and tell their stories was pretty amazing. The exciting thing is it hasn't stagnated as an agency - A Safe Place has done a really good job of continuing to go forward with the issue."

In the fall of 1995, District Court Magistrate Roxana Viera, who supported the establishment of ASafe Place, said, "We haven't had anything really serious happen here, but it's only a matter of time." October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Tragically, this October also marks the third anniversary of Nantucket's first domestic murder. A Safe Place chose Oct. 14 for the founding celebration to be held at Cinco on Amelia Drive just a few doors down from the agency's office. The event will take place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and tickets, including refreshments, are $75. People are asked to RSVP by Oct. 12 and may obtain more information by calling 228-0561 or emailing to safe@nantucket.

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