This I Believe.. / Tweet of the Week Donation

            The first time that the dining room table and chairs were flipped over in a drunken rage, it came as a shock to me. By the fifth, sixth, twentieth time it happened, I didn’t even flinch. The night that the empty whiskey bottle sailed across the room, hitting the wall and cracking the plaster just inches to my left, I burst into tears and cowered in fear. Several months later when a snow globe, a gift from my Grandpa, met the same fate… I was too numb to care.

            As time went by, the occasional alcohol-fueled outburst morphed into daily intrusions upon my personal freedom and malicious verbal attacks. My debit card would disappear from my wallet, only to return a day or two later with a receipt that read, “Available Account Balance: $0.00.” I would suddenly hear the front door slam closed, and look out the window to see him driving off in my car. When outrageous, jealous accusations and venomous words spewed forth, I simply put my head down and waited for it to stop. For all of his emotional abuse, he never laid a hand on me. The first and only time that I feared physical harm from him was the day that I found the strength to walk away.            I remember that day with frightening clarity. I returned home from work approximately ten minutes later than usual, and had neglected to call and let him know. I walked into the door of the small apartment that we rented on Binghamton’s West Side, kicking off my sandals and dropping my purse at the door, mentally preparing myself for the bitter accusations about what I must have been doing with those unaccounted for minutes. I was met instead with a menacing glare and absolute silence. He stood up and walked towards me, an intimidating presence at 6’4’’. He brushed past me, still maintaining that glare, and reached for the purse I had dropped to the ground. He searched slowly and methodically until he found what he was looking for, pulling my car keys and my cellphone out and putting them into his pockets. In that moment, all I could think was, I am going to become a statistic. I am going to become a battered woman. Instinct kicked in and I ran, still barefoot, down the three flights of stairs and out the door of our apartment building. I walked to the closest convenience store and called my father, only managing to say to him, “Dad, I want to come home.” I never looked back.

This I believe, every individual will, at some point, have a life experience that shakes them to their core. This experience will strip away every belief they have ever held about themselves as a human being, their place in the world, and the values that they hold dear. Existing in, and ultimately leaving, a relationship built on a foundation of emotional abuse was that experience for me.

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This is my story, and the experiences described above had a profound impact on the person that I am today. I'm fortunate that I had the strength to walk away, with the love and support from an incredible network of family and friends. Not everybody is so lucky, and millions of women end up feeling like they are stuck in abusive relationships, with no one to turn to for help.

For this reason, I am choosing to donate the Tweet of the Week winnings to RISE, a local agency that provides a wide variety of services to victims of domestic abuse. Last week, I was able to have a conversation with Rebecca Allerton, the executive director of RISE. During our talk, she explained some of the services that the agency provides, as well as a brief explanation of how they are funded.

RISE offers emergency shelter for women escaping violent situations. The shelter is set up to be as much like a home as possible, offering each resident / family their own bedroom and bathroom. The shelter has a maximum capacity of 20 occupants, and can include any combination of women and children. The shelter maintains a well stocked "mall", from which women can take clothes and other personal items for themselves or their children upon coming to the shelter. More often than not, people will arrive with only what they have on their backs.

RISE is not only a shelter, however. There are staff at RISE that assist in providing legal information, and help women in filing petitions with the family court. They accompany women to appointments and advocate for the women, many of whom do not know the ins and outs of the complicated legal system, and may not be able to properly advocate for their own safety. They often assist women in obtaining new identification and birth certificates, as abusers will take these documents as a way to control their victims. Advocacy services are not limited to women within the shelter, and are offered to anyone who reaches out for help. Often, if a woman does stay at the shelter for a period of time, advocacy services will continue long after she has left. The ultimate goal of RISE is to ensure that these women are able to be safe in their own homes after having left a violent situation.

RISE has a budget of approximately $900,000 per year. This is primarily through government funding and grants. There is also a system of per diem funding with the local Department of Social Services. When a women enters the shelter and stays for a night, RISE gets reimbursed through DSS. This per diem method of billing and reimbursement is inconsistent, however, because it is impossible to tell how many women will enter the shelter at any given time, and how long they will stay. Ms. Allerton did specify that much of the funding goes to paying salaries, as they cannot offer effective services without quality staff members to provide them.

I asked Ms. Allerton what impact a donation approximately $100 would make, as it is certainly not enough to fund a staff position for any length of time. She let me know that our donation would likely be used to buy items for the "mall".