Family Justice Center Alliance
Thank You to Our Funders This holiday season we want to express a special thank you to our funders –- those amazing organizations that have invested in our local, state, and national vision for Family Justice Centers and other models of services that bring together many agencies to meet the needs of victims and their children by putting everything they need under one roof. We also want to recognize the Office on Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice for funding us to lead the first ever National Strangulation Training Institute (STI). STI will help us address one of the most lethal forms of domestic violence and, by developing specialized experts across the country and in-depth training for police, prosecutors, advocates, and medical professionals, will help us save many lives in the months and years ahead. This past year the Alliance has enjoyed strong support from Blue Shield of California Foundation as we have continued our statewide California Family Justice Initiative (CFJI). CFJI is the first statewide initiative in the country to support development of a network of Family Justice Centers with Learning Exchange Teams from each site sharing information and lessons learned with each other on a regular basis. We now have 14 Family Justice Centers in California with five more slated to open in the next year. Bess Bendet and the whole team at Blue Shield Against Violence have helped us develop an amazing, innovative, and evolving statewide network.
Casey Gwinn and Gael Strack with the Verizon Foundation Team
Casey Gwinn with Bess Bendet and Christine Tran with the Blue Shield of California Foundation
We are honored to have major support from the Verizon Foundation for the FJC Institute. This year we have three primary focus areas: Outreach to and Engagement of Men to stop violence against women; Outreach to Teens; and Changing the Ending of “Telling Amy’s Story.” The Verizon Foundation and Verizon Wireless have also provided tremendous support to Family Justice Centers across the United States this past year helping to support the many agencies working to address domestic violence. Rose Kirk, Lupita Reyes, and Melody Brown are tremendous leaders and understand the power of collaborative work to empower and support victims and their children.
Family Justice Center Alliance
Thank You to Our Funders As noted earlier, we greatly appreciate all the support we receive from Sue Carbon, Susan Williams, and the Office on Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice. OVW funds a portion of our national Family Justice Center Alliance work including assisting with our annual International Family Justice Center Conference each year. They also support our work in New Orleans with the New Orleans Family Justice Center and all their allied agencies. And, as noted above, they are now supporting our national leadership role around strangulation and the need for better identification, documentation, and prosecution of strangulation cases with surviving domestic violence and sexual assault victims.
Casey Gwinn and Gael Strack with Susan Carbon, Director of the Office on Violence Against Women
Our work with Management Systems International (MSI) and USAID this past year has been very meaningful as we are supporting the creation of twelve new Family Justice Centers in Mexico through the leadership of Mexican President Felipe Calderon. The first Mexican Centers are now operating in Monterrey and Chihuahua with many more in development. The Women’s Justice Centers (Centros de Justicia para las Mujeres), as they are called in Mexico, will help save many lives in Mexico and the need is so great with thousands of women killed there in recent years. We also want to thank the many communities that we have worked with directly this last year on FJC Snapshots, strategic planning services for new Centers, law enforcement training, and a variety of other onsite work we have done with operating and developing Family Justice Centers including; Hamilton County, Indiana; Honolulu, Hawaii; Cleveland, Ohio; Meridian, Mississippi; Salt Lake City, UT; Sweetwater County, Wyoming; Thurston County, Washington; Peel Region, Ontario; Chihuahua, Mexico; and many others. In difficult economic times, we have been blessed with large and small funders that truly understand the power of the multi-agency, coordinated community response services model and want to invest their money in ways that has the most positive impact for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault and their children.