October 22, 2024 • 31 mins
Louie talks with Jayvon Howard from the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence about a partnership with an LGBTQIA homeless shelter. Jayvon revisits his work at a local program to describes the partnership, the services provided to the LGBTQIA young adults at the shelter, and more.
This episode is part of a series on partnerships that reach and support men who are survivors of sexual violence.
Discussed in this episode:
Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence: https://oaesv.org/
Working with Male Survivors of Sexual Violence: https://www.nsvrc.org/working-male-survivors-sexual-violence
This project was supported by Grant No. 15JOVW-21-GK-02215-MUMU awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence
Resource Center, an understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual
abuse and assault. I'm Louis Marvin, and I'm a project coordinator at the
NSVRC. NSVRC is a division of respect together.
This episode is part of a series on partnerships that reach and support
(00:21):
men who are survivors of sexual violence today. Jayvon Howard is joining
me to talk about an example of an effective partnership from when he
worked at a local program. Jayvon is now the manager of Engaging Men
Initiatives at the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence. Hi, Jayvon, welcome
(00:58):
to the podcast. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your
work at the Ohio Alliance. Hey Louie. Thank you for having me. It's good
to see you this afternoon. Yes, so I am the Manager of Engaging
Men Initiatives with the Ohio Alliance and Sexual Violence.
My pronouns are he, him, his, I wanted to make sure I put
(01:19):
that in there as well. So, my role with the Alliance,
I mainly do a lot of work where I'm doing the training and
technical assistance, providing training and information resources on how
to serve men who are survivors of sexual violence. So that's doing like
survivor advocacy training and also engaging men around violence prevention.
(01:43):
I wear a lot of many hats. So with my role,
I do a lot of different things, but mostly
I provide those trainings. I do podcasts episodes, like you have me here
today and I'm happy to be a part of this one.
Resources on the Go is one of my favorite ones to tune into. I
do public trainings and speaking engagements helping discuss and get the
(02:07):
word out about male survivorship. A lot of folks don't recognize that men
can be survivors of sexual violence, so I do a lot of public
speaking about that. We help create products and resources to give to rape
crisis centers throughout the state of Ohio as well. So that's a little
bit of what I do with my work. I'm a little bit about
(02:29):
myself. I'm a writer. I often refer to myself as a Warrior Sorcerer. You
might hear me say that in a couple of different places.
I'm an artist, I like to paint. I don't know what else
to say about myself. I'm not always very good at answering that question,
but thank you for having me here. Thanks Jayvon, for telling us a
(02:51):
little bit about yourself. And I know I'm a big fan of your
work in Ohio. You're doing great stuff there. And I also know that
before you worked at the Ohio Alliance, you worked at a local program
as an LGBTQIA Outreach Advocate, and that in the course of that work,
you provided services in person at a youth homeless shelter. So could you
(03:16):
tell us about what went into providing those services?
What was beneficial about going to the shelter to provide those services
and who received those services? Yes, I would love to talk about this.
So this was one of my first positions of doing like full outreach
with a local program. So the thing about doing outreach is
(03:40):
the main model of that is really like being present and meeting people
where they are. So this, well, I say this, I'm not sure if it's like a
service program. I'm not sure which word would be the better way they're
describing it, but the way that it was designed is that essentially my
position was a co located position. So this goes into a little bit
(04:00):
about what best practices look like when we're trying to design partnerships
such as this one where it is best to meet people where they
are. We want to remove barriers for survivors as much as possible especially
if we're talking about youth homeless shelters. And so I wanna clarify when
we're saying a youth homeless shelter, we are talking about emerging adulthood
(04:23):
and emerging adults. So the shelter only served 18 24 year olds,
so that's the population that we were working with. And so
they're young. Many of them were in the shelter because they were maybe
kicked out of their home. They were running, they were runaways.
Maybe they aged out of foster care. Some of them maybe were in
(04:45):
between jobs. They didn't have resources to rely on with family,
and so they didn't necessarily have those resources to live independently.
And so those were typically the populations that we were working with.
And so these folks don't have those resources to get to
services. If they were experiencing violence they may not have known about
(05:08):
these type of resources that they existed. They wouldn't know about protection
orders. They wouldn't know about how to navigate the court system.
These are really young folk. They're folks that aren't connected to these
systems, maybe are connected to the systems, but don't know how to navigate
them typically we'll give them a phone number to call and they get sent
to one organization to talk to. And another organization, another organization.
(05:30):
And many of them didn't even have phones. And so the way that
this program was designed was that with this position
about I would say maybe two times a week
I would spend part of my time positioned and stationed at the youth homeless
shelters, provide our services that I would typically provide to survivors
(05:54):
who are adults with our, at the office.
So those services were like talking with folks on the hotline, helping folks
navigate the court system, providing support group services
one on one intervention, helping with safety planning
doing like landlord advocacy, all of those things. So rather than folks
(06:14):
having to come all the way downtown or navigate and find their way,
I was there at the shelter twice a week.
And so, yeah, that's what those services looks like. Thanks for going through
that and describing that. And I appreciate you talking about the age,
the age range specifically, because sometimes we say youth and that might
(06:35):
mean a lot of different things. And so you are working with 18 24
year olds. And in the project that I work on, we're talking about
men. So adult men, and so we could maybe think of the group
you were working with as young adults in certain context too.
Definitely a relevant story and model for the larger project that we're
(07:03):
talking about in terms of reaching and working with men,
and you touched on aspects of the partnership
already, and of course, our series, our podcast series that we're doing
is about forming partnerships and what effective partnerships look like
in terms of reaching and engaging men and
(07:26):
clearly, of course, in order to do that work and in order for
our listeners to maybe do something similar in their own communities,
you've got to have that partnership in place, so
tell us a little bit more about how you got the group started
and just what went into forming and maintaining that relationship with the
(07:48):
shelter where you were doing these two days a week,
going on site to provide these services? Yeah. So, partially, the relationship
was already established beforehand. So, there's a couple layers to how,
these partnerships were kind of formed. So, the first layer of it was
(08:10):
leadership. So, it speaks to the importance of the involvement of leadership
and having leadership buy in with any programming and trainings and partnerships
that you are really trying to design and implement.
None of this really would have been possible without the leadership between
both of programs, the youth shelter and the program
(08:32):
I was working at for them to collaborate together at that top end
as well. Designing the position, designing how many hours was appropriate
for their advocate to be also co located at another
agency and space. Like, who would be the supervisor and report into what?
(08:53):
What kind of policy and procedures would be appropriate?
So, that way, we're able to provide proper services. And so,
there's that level of leadership involvement that came into play that was
necessary. That kind of happened outside my scope of what I was doing
and it was kind of done before I arrived there.
Part of the ways that we put together this partnership was,
(09:17):
needing, a space where I could actually meet with
the young folks. So, we had to come together and go through like a
tour of the building and start identifying ways that we could
utilize different spaces and different rooms. There's sometimes a challenge
of maintaining confidentiality. So, we have to work together a lot around
(09:40):
that as a small, a lot of, so the way it was like, a
lot of them lived together in the same building. They were coming and
going. But everyone who I connected with, so I would intentionally,
when I would come twice a week, try to spend some time with
them while they're at the shelter, even when I wasn't necessarily like running
a support group. So, that's one of the other ways that we've developed
(10:02):
that partnership. We started a support group as a way of having us
stay connected as well. So, it's like we designed different specific services
that would be necessary. So, we have to identify that.
What were the needs that the student, not the students, I'll say students,
what were the needs that the youth were needing? And really,
it's like coming together in meetings multiple times. It's good to keep
(10:26):
that outreach going, building those relationships, really trying to identify
what things we have in common. All of this work is intersectional and
overlapping. What to do when, there are survivors in the shelter,
and they're also living with the perpetrators in the shelter, like having
those types of discussions on how do we,
(10:47):
even rearrange or design the way that we have homeless shelters to ensure
safety for folks who are there. I hope that answered your question.
I'm sure there's more I could get into. I want to make sure
that I'm not going off on too much of a tangent.
Oh yeah, this is all good. You were sharing
such great and practical tips for advocates who might want to get something
(11:12):
like this started in their community, and that's definitely,
a goal of these conversations is for people to
hear something and hopefully for that to spark,
an idea of how to form a new partnership or how to improve
an existing partnership. And, every relationship like the one you're describing
is going to be specific to the community that it's serving.
(11:35):
And so it won't look exactly the same somewhere else, but we know
that there are lots of things to learn about
good examples of these kinds of partnerships. So I think everything you're
saying is super helpful to probably a lot of different listeners.
That's perfect. I wanted to also add that I wasn't the only co
(11:57):
located person at the shelter. So this, again, like, leadership among like
different organizations across the city. So, there was other agencies that
were also co located. So they were, we would have like some sort
of like triage in a sense. Like even though we wouldn't necessarily collaborate
(12:18):
with one another across agencies, we all did collaborate together at the
shelter. And so it made it a really good way of removing practical
barriers for folks living in the shelter, being able to access services.
You can think about that or applying that to any kind of population
that might be struggling to come to your building. Maybe because of confidentiality,
(12:41):
they're worried that someone might see them utilizing your services. What
does it look like to build a partnership where, somewhere else that they
might go that might feel more anonymous or confidential.
So things like that. Yeah. I love that. Those are all great thoughts.
And you said something earlier about, was it landlord advocacy, I think
(13:05):
is what you said, one of the things that you provided.
Could you talk about what that looked like? I think that that is
something, really exciting to think about in terms of
people who are working at rape crisis centers and how they might
go about offering that to survivors. So what did landlord advocacy
(13:29):
look like for you in that role? Yeah. So
with working with these folks, landlord advocacy, often trying to provide
like as much comprehensive safety planning to survivors as possible. So
helping them, break leases. If they're a part of a lease,
helping them get their, like a co signer, helping them figure out opportunities
(13:54):
to find housing at the shelter. Folks are already like working with a
caseworker or as some sort of social worker they probably were working with
to help them do more of that detailed work of finding stable,
independent housing for themselves. But as an advocate, I was able to help
them navigate some of those systems as well. So giving them some information
(14:17):
about like what to expect, how to find and shop for an apartment. Sometimes
if folks were maybe at the beginning, maybe living in an apartment and
that's where they experienced violence and abuse. And the reason why that
they're now in the shelter is because they're, seeking
safe shelter, giving them some tips for safety planning for going back home,
(14:40):
safety planning for maybe if they're that person who,
that their abuser is someone that's living with them, how to get that
person maybe evicted, get in protection orders, that type of nature.
How to talk with their landlord and property manager, because sometimes
(15:00):
there's, instances, many instances where there might be violence in an apartment.
And because you might complain about it or file a police report or
call the police, landlords might take that as a problem or issue for
their property. And they might have, they might evict you or break your
lease for both parties. And so sometimes that landlord advocacy could look
(15:23):
like talking to the landlord and explaining to them what trauma is and
talking to them what sexual violence or domestic violence looks like,
talking to them about like the importance of like safety in the home and,
what, like those types of things. And so
those types of conversations were pretty helpful to provide that type of
advocacy when folks were trying to figure those types of things out with
(15:46):
their property manager. There's so many different layers to it. I don't
want to miss anything, but I also want to pause in case you had any more
follow up questions. No, that's great. I really appreciate that you did
that work and that you're talking about it
in the context of, yeah, of being an advocate at a rape crisis
(16:06):
center. I think there are possibly, some listeners who
might think of that work specifically as in the domain of like the
case manager, like you said. So I just think that's great to reframe
and to see the role that an advocate from a rape crisis center
can bring to that level of advocacy. And like you said,
(16:28):
talking about the trauma of sexual violence as one way of
providing that advocacy. So I hope that people are hearing that and going,
wow, that's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, that took up most
of what the advocacy would be, would be having conversations. You're sort
of like a mediator in a sense, sometimes, explaining to the landlord,
(16:52):
like, it's like, it's not that simple that they were not just fighting,
this was domestic violence and this is what domestic violence is.
This is what it looks like. And this is different ways that it
shows up. Like, and so, yeah, let's hopefully like folks hear that this
is a great way to be able to safety plan with the survivor.
Thanks. And I know that groups were also part of your advocacy work
(17:17):
in this partnership. Could you talk about just like the structures of the
groups? What did those groups look like? Yeah. So that year,
when I was an advocate was the year of support groups.
I had so many support groups I was facilitating at the time.
I had the one at the youth homeless shelter.
I had a couple at the justice center, at the jail,
(17:41):
there was the LGBTQIA group as well. So that was the year of
my groups. A lot of them were structured very similarly. So the way
that I would do it at the shelter,
there was about once a week, I think it was maybe Thursday,
I think it was like Tuesday, Thursday. We would have the time,
(18:01):
I would have my flyers that I created and set up throughout the
shelter. So folks were aware of the group and the time,
what room we were meeting in. And if I had a particular theme
or topic that I wanted us to kind of get into,
and that would be based off of what I was basically here,
got them gossip about, or what we discussed in the previous
(18:24):
group, I would maybe set the theme around those types of things around
like consent, around healthy relationships. We would talk about
hygiene and things like that, like whatever that they needed to kind of
focus on to help get us in some of the conversations they needed
to talk about around trauma. And so I would have those flyers. We'd meet
(18:45):
about once a week for about an hour, hour and a half.
I read it as a peer led group. And so I would be
facilitator to kind of bring the group together. We would ground and center
around the topic. We would do temperature checks. So it was like,
I'll ask them what the rain cloud was or something like that.
(19:06):
And they get them started on talking about things that they had going
on and what their sun, their rainbow was, or the sun, sunny thing
was. So I think that's going really well for them, something that's not
going so well. And then we start getting into it. And that
was pretty effective for them to get talking.
Yeah. So I think that's the main structure for it.
(19:29):
We facilitated sometimes like more, I would say...
Informal kind of spaces as well. So not necessarily support groups where
we'll have them coming together and trying to help them sort of like discuss
deep problems and solve problems. But sometimes we'd also
(19:50):
break from that and do more of like a social kind of space
where they can kind of just like hang out and be more vulnerable
together versus like, when they're out in the greater space where they don't
really know each other, they kind of have had like contact with one
another in certain kind of spaces, but they ended up pulling them together
to have the social space as well was pretty beneficial for me to
(20:12):
build trust with them, for them to understand me, someone that they could
work with. I also wanna note that I was, I think 23 or
24 at the time when I was doing this. So there was also
that level where I had to kind of like connect with them a
certain way so they understood me as a service provider and not just
another person in the shelter. That's really helpful, and I wanna
(20:36):
make sure I'm framing this a little bit for our listeners.
We're talking about partnerships that can help reach and provide services
to men. And I think that probably the services that you're talking about
were not gender specific but in the course of doing this partnership and
(20:56):
in the course of having a relationship with the LGBTQIA young people at
the shelter, you were serving people of all genders, including men.
And so I think that's a really important way to think about this
because sometimes when we're in a space when we're talking about like, what
are services for men it's easy to kind of consider those as
(21:22):
gender specific or like only for men, but no, that in fact does
not have to be like that. The groups
that you're describing right now, for example, I assume were all genders,
men, women, non binary, young people. And so, yeah, I don't know if
you want to say anything more about that, but like, I think that's
(21:44):
really cool and intentional that here, we're talking about
working with men, but we're not talking about only working with men or having
like a gender segregated space necessarily. Yeah, that's a good observation.
Yeah, many of the spaces were open to all genders to join.
I think that's something that a lot of folks maybe they shy away
(22:04):
from when they're thinking about designing and building support groups for
men is the idea that these groups can't be co ed some rape crisis centers,
many rape crisis centers already have some form of support group or ancillary
service where they're providing some sort of social space or space for survivors
to get together, process emotions, talk about different social emotional
(22:27):
learning, healing, connect with each other, connect to services
that men cannot be a part of those spaces too, if women are
a part of those spaces or folks who are trans can't be a
part of those spaces. If folks who are CIS are in those spaces
and realistically everyone benefits the most when our spaces are more diverse.
(22:51):
We learn more from one another. We see our own humanity better.
We see each other's humanity better. We understand that these experiences,
although not normal, and although prevalent are not unique, that you're
not alone. That there are others who have had this experience,
even people that you'd never imagine like, oh my gosh, like this person
(23:15):
who was, there's a man who's big and buff and strong and like, looks like
he can, he just eats weights all day
can experience sexual violence or experience abuse and have his consent
violated. Like these things are myths. Like, so like yeah, absolutely these
spaces welcome all genders. Sometimes it was just
(23:36):
a men's only space, but that wasn't necessarily on purpose or set to
be that way. Sometimes it was just a men's only space.
Sometimes it was just a women's only space and it's just depending on like
who attended at the time. But yeah, I actually found the most success
at having men join those spaces when they were
(23:57):
multiple genders, and that was at the youth homeless shelter.
Despite all the other support groups I had, that was the one where we
had the most diversity. Yeah. Thanks for saying that. And
speaking of the other support groups, I don't know, well, I know that
your experience doing this group helped you kind of think about new models
(24:18):
of doing other forms of outreach. And is, are those other support groups
what you're talking about? Or is there more to those like launching those
other models of doing different forms of outreach?
Tell us a little bit more about that. A little bit.
So it kind of gave, started the like a co located model of
(24:39):
building pipelines between agencies. So even though like, so I mentioned
earlier that we... I was not the only one at that space who
was co located. And so although this was removing a lot of barriers
for survivors to access services, it also created
(25:00):
unintentional barriers on being able to provide services where
we were all going back to different agencies and maybe we were working
with one person and I was working with someone who was in a
support group, and then we had someone else from a job or family
services who was helping them with landlord work, working with this person
(25:20):
as well, who's co located, and then there's their case manager who was
working with multiple folks who may not always be present. And so
having those barriers sometimes and being able to
stay connected to each other and have like a really fully fully comprehensive
way of providing services wasn't always there. So the model that kind of
(25:44):
came from that was like, what does it look like to build more
of a pipeline. Where we aren't necessarily just like guessing where survivors
need to go when they call one of our agencies, but we have
maybe like a standard practice of like, hey, you are first line of
defense of like, take good care of these needs for someone.
(26:06):
And then we send you to the next agency and then we send
you to this agency. And then we know that if we need training,
we'll call these folks and they have advocates who are able to do
that training. And so that ideal world, that's something that we already
do. And in some degree, we are doing that. But sometimes folks just do not
(26:29):
have the capacity with programs when they're smaller.
Some programs only have like 4 or 5 advocates. And so saying like, let's
build all of these systems between agencies might sound easy and simple,
but it's not always that simple. But to know like, yeah,
trying to build those pipelines where you have multiple points of contact
(26:49):
at an agency, it's not just one person. The how you all work
together, you're thinking about sustainability. So that with someone, the
retention is kind of low on our field. Sometimes it's between two to
three years. What happens when that advocate leaves and they've been working
with these survivors or they've been running these support groups or they've
(27:09):
been building these programs and developing these outreach pipelines and
these networks with other agencies. It's like that one goes away so does
that connection, so does that collaboration. So building that stronger foundation
of outreach where we know as agencies we have each other's back and
we know how we're going to have each other's back. And so that's kind
(27:31):
of where I started working with that. I was pretty successful at creating
those connections. It kind of put me into the track of training a
bit closer because I got my foot in the door by providing trainings. That
was my way of getting my foot in the door with agencies to
build those pipelines. I will call, connect with multiple people and offer
(27:53):
to train their full staff on services and then go from there.
Great. So many great things I think that many different listeners can
connect to maybe a new way of thinking about something they're already trying
to do, or I think you're also offering things that a lot of
people might be hearing for the first time. So really appreciate you reflecting
(28:15):
on that work that you did in your old role and how
the partnership wasn't just the partnership, it was all these other things
too. It helped build your partnerships and relationships with more agencies
and thinking of sustainability and those pipelines of outreach.
So thanks for thinking back and walking us through how that all worked
(28:39):
and how you saw it being effective. Is there anything else that you
wanted to talk about today with our listeners?
I would want to add to remember that,
we all have something to offer. When you're thinking about building partnerships
and connections that sometimes we might be discriminatory about who we feel
(29:01):
like are able to provide us services, provide us valuable collaboration,
and it's good to have discernment and it's very good to like know
what your goals are and your objectives so that we're, because time is
the most precious currency. We don't have time to just be doing anything
and everything. But also to, remember that relationships are the most important
(29:22):
thing about this work, that connecting with people is the most important
thing about this work, and it's our collective humanity. And so all partnerships
can be good partnerships. I believe in, and I've been working on this
a little bit of decolonizing love. So essentially that you know even if
(29:42):
partnerships are not such good partnerships, there is maybe... If there's
room for transformation, find ways to transform those partnerships because
at the end of the day our mission is to end violence,
it is to serve survivors of violence, and so
we owe it to them and to ourselves for a better society
(30:02):
to allow for that room for transformation when necessary. So relationship
building is critical and key. And so yeah, I just wanted to add
that. Thanks. I think that's a perfect place to leave this conversation.
Yeah, Thanks for this, Jayvon. This was great. It was really great to
talk with you today. And to our listeners, thank you for listening to
(30:24):
this episode of Resource On The Go. For more resources and information about
understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual assault, visit our website
at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc
respecttogether.org.
Welcome to Resource on the Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence
Resource Center, an understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual
abuse and assault. I'm Louis Marvin, and I'm a project coordinator at the
NSVRC. NSVRC is a division of respect together.
This episode is part of a series on partnerships that reach and support
(00:21):
men who are survivors of sexual violence today. Jayvon Howard is joining
me to talk about an example of an effective partnership from when he
worked at a local program. Jayvon is now the manager of Engaging Men
Initiatives at the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence. Hi, Jayvon, welcome
(00:58):
to the podcast. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your
work at the Ohio Alliance. Hey Louie. Thank you for having me. It's good
to see you this afternoon. Yes, so I am the Manager of Engaging
Men Initiatives with the Ohio Alliance and Sexual Violence.
My pronouns are he, him, his, I wanted to make sure I put
(01:19):
that in there as well. So, my role with the Alliance,
I mainly do a lot of work where I'm doing the training and
technical assistance, providing training and information resources on how
to serve men who are survivors of sexual violence. So that's doing like
survivor advocacy training and also engaging men around violence prevention.
(01:43):
I wear a lot of many hats. So with my role,
I do a lot of different things, but mostly
I provide those trainings. I do podcasts episodes, like you have me here
today and I'm happy to be a part of this one.
Resources on the Go is one of my favorite ones to tune into. I
do public trainings and speaking engagements helping discuss and get the
(02:07):
word out about male survivorship. A lot of folks don't recognize that men
can be survivors of sexual violence, so I do a lot of public
speaking about that. We help create products and resources to give to rape
crisis centers throughout the state of Ohio as well. So that's a little
bit of what I do with my work. I'm a little bit about
(02:29):
myself. I'm a writer. I often refer to myself as a Warrior Sorcerer. You
might hear me say that in a couple of different places.
I'm an artist, I like to paint. I don't know what else
to say about myself. I'm not always very good at answering that question,
but thank you for having me here. Thanks Jayvon, for telling us a
(02:51):
little bit about yourself. And I know I'm a big fan of your
work in Ohio. You're doing great stuff there. And I also know that
before you worked at the Ohio Alliance, you worked at a local program
as an LGBTQIA Outreach Advocate, and that in the course of that work,
you provided services in person at a youth homeless shelter. So could you
(03:16):
tell us about what went into providing those services?
What was beneficial about going to the shelter to provide those services
and who received those services? Yes, I would love to talk about this.
So this was one of my first positions of doing like full outreach
with a local program. So the thing about doing outreach is
(03:40):
the main model of that is really like being present and meeting people
where they are. So this, well, I say this, I'm not sure if it's like a
service program. I'm not sure which word would be the better way they're
describing it, but the way that it was designed is that essentially my
position was a co located position. So this goes into a little bit
(04:00):
about what best practices look like when we're trying to design partnerships
such as this one where it is best to meet people where they
are. We want to remove barriers for survivors as much as possible especially
if we're talking about youth homeless shelters. And so I wanna clarify when
we're saying a youth homeless shelter, we are talking about emerging adulthood
(04:23):
and emerging adults. So the shelter only served 18 24 year olds,
so that's the population that we were working with. And so
they're young. Many of them were in the shelter because they were maybe
kicked out of their home. They were running, they were runaways.
Maybe they aged out of foster care. Some of them maybe were in
(04:45):
between jobs. They didn't have resources to rely on with family,
and so they didn't necessarily have those resources to live independently.
And so those were typically the populations that we were working with.
And so these folks don't have those resources to get to
services. If they were experiencing violence they may not have known about
(05:08):
these type of resources that they existed. They wouldn't know about protection
orders. They wouldn't know about how to navigate the court system.
These are really young folk. They're folks that aren't connected to these
systems, maybe are connected to the systems, but don't know how to navigate
them typically we'll give them a phone number to call and they get sent
to one organization to talk to. And another organization, another organization.
(05:30):
And many of them didn't even have phones. And so the way that
this program was designed was that with this position
about I would say maybe two times a week
I would spend part of my time positioned and stationed at the youth homeless
shelters, provide our services that I would typically provide to survivors
(05:54):
who are adults with our, at the office.
So those services were like talking with folks on the hotline, helping folks
navigate the court system, providing support group services
one on one intervention, helping with safety planning
doing like landlord advocacy, all of those things. So rather than folks
(06:14):
having to come all the way downtown or navigate and find their way,
I was there at the shelter twice a week.
And so, yeah, that's what those services looks like. Thanks for going through
that and describing that. And I appreciate you talking about the age,
the age range specifically, because sometimes we say youth and that might
(06:35):
mean a lot of different things. And so you are working with 18 24
year olds. And in the project that I work on, we're talking about
men. So adult men, and so we could maybe think of the group
you were working with as young adults in certain context too.
Definitely a relevant story and model for the larger project that we're
(07:03):
talking about in terms of reaching and working with men,
and you touched on aspects of the partnership
already, and of course, our series, our podcast series that we're doing
is about forming partnerships and what effective partnerships look like
in terms of reaching and engaging men and
(07:26):
clearly, of course, in order to do that work and in order for
our listeners to maybe do something similar in their own communities,
you've got to have that partnership in place, so
tell us a little bit more about how you got the group started
and just what went into forming and maintaining that relationship with the
(07:48):
shelter where you were doing these two days a week,
going on site to provide these services? Yeah. So, partially, the relationship
was already established beforehand. So, there's a couple layers to how,
these partnerships were kind of formed. So, the first layer of it was
(08:10):
leadership. So, it speaks to the importance of the involvement of leadership
and having leadership buy in with any programming and trainings and partnerships
that you are really trying to design and implement.
None of this really would have been possible without the leadership between
both of programs, the youth shelter and the program
(08:32):
I was working at for them to collaborate together at that top end
as well. Designing the position, designing how many hours was appropriate
for their advocate to be also co located at another
agency and space. Like, who would be the supervisor and report into what?
(08:53):
What kind of policy and procedures would be appropriate?
So, that way, we're able to provide proper services. And so,
there's that level of leadership involvement that came into play that was
necessary. That kind of happened outside my scope of what I was doing
and it was kind of done before I arrived there.
Part of the ways that we put together this partnership was,
(09:17):
needing, a space where I could actually meet with
the young folks. So, we had to come together and go through like a
tour of the building and start identifying ways that we could
utilize different spaces and different rooms. There's sometimes a challenge
of maintaining confidentiality. So, we have to work together a lot around
(09:40):
that as a small, a lot of, so the way it was like, a
lot of them lived together in the same building. They were coming and
going. But everyone who I connected with, so I would intentionally,
when I would come twice a week, try to spend some time with
them while they're at the shelter, even when I wasn't necessarily like running
a support group. So, that's one of the other ways that we've developed
(10:02):
that partnership. We started a support group as a way of having us
stay connected as well. So, it's like we designed different specific services
that would be necessary. So, we have to identify that.
What were the needs that the student, not the students, I'll say students,
what were the needs that the youth were needing? And really,
it's like coming together in meetings multiple times. It's good to keep
(10:26):
that outreach going, building those relationships, really trying to identify
what things we have in common. All of this work is intersectional and
overlapping. What to do when, there are survivors in the shelter,
and they're also living with the perpetrators in the shelter, like having
those types of discussions on how do we,
(10:47):
even rearrange or design the way that we have homeless shelters to ensure
safety for folks who are there. I hope that answered your question.
I'm sure there's more I could get into. I want to make sure
that I'm not going off on too much of a tangent.
Oh yeah, this is all good. You were sharing
such great and practical tips for advocates who might want to get something
(11:12):
like this started in their community, and that's definitely,
a goal of these conversations is for people to
hear something and hopefully for that to spark,
an idea of how to form a new partnership or how to improve
an existing partnership. And, every relationship like the one you're describing
is going to be specific to the community that it's serving.
(11:35):
And so it won't look exactly the same somewhere else, but we know
that there are lots of things to learn about
good examples of these kinds of partnerships. So I think everything you're
saying is super helpful to probably a lot of different listeners.
That's perfect. I wanted to also add that I wasn't the only co
(11:57):
located person at the shelter. So this, again, like, leadership among like
different organizations across the city. So, there was other agencies that
were also co located. So they were, we would have like some sort
of like triage in a sense. Like even though we wouldn't necessarily collaborate
(12:18):
with one another across agencies, we all did collaborate together at the
shelter. And so it made it a really good way of removing practical
barriers for folks living in the shelter, being able to access services.
You can think about that or applying that to any kind of population
that might be struggling to come to your building. Maybe because of confidentiality,
(12:41):
they're worried that someone might see them utilizing your services. What
does it look like to build a partnership where, somewhere else that they
might go that might feel more anonymous or confidential.
So things like that. Yeah. I love that. Those are all great thoughts.
And you said something earlier about, was it landlord advocacy, I think
(13:05):
is what you said, one of the things that you provided.
Could you talk about what that looked like? I think that that is
something, really exciting to think about in terms of
people who are working at rape crisis centers and how they might
go about offering that to survivors. So what did landlord advocacy
(13:29):
look like for you in that role? Yeah. So
with working with these folks, landlord advocacy, often trying to provide
like as much comprehensive safety planning to survivors as possible. So
helping them, break leases. If they're a part of a lease,
helping them get their, like a co signer, helping them figure out opportunities
(13:54):
to find housing at the shelter. Folks are already like working with a
caseworker or as some sort of social worker they probably were working with
to help them do more of that detailed work of finding stable,
independent housing for themselves. But as an advocate, I was able to help
them navigate some of those systems as well. So giving them some information
(14:17):
about like what to expect, how to find and shop for an apartment. Sometimes
if folks were maybe at the beginning, maybe living in an apartment and
that's where they experienced violence and abuse. And the reason why that
they're now in the shelter is because they're, seeking
safe shelter, giving them some tips for safety planning for going back home,
(14:40):
safety planning for maybe if they're that person who,
that their abuser is someone that's living with them, how to get that
person maybe evicted, get in protection orders, that type of nature.
How to talk with their landlord and property manager, because sometimes
(15:00):
there's, instances, many instances where there might be violence in an apartment.
And because you might complain about it or file a police report or
call the police, landlords might take that as a problem or issue for
their property. And they might have, they might evict you or break your
lease for both parties. And so sometimes that landlord advocacy could look
(15:23):
like talking to the landlord and explaining to them what trauma is and
talking to them what sexual violence or domestic violence looks like,
talking to them about like the importance of like safety in the home and,
what, like those types of things. And so
those types of conversations were pretty helpful to provide that type of
advocacy when folks were trying to figure those types of things out with
(15:46):
their property manager. There's so many different layers to it. I don't
want to miss anything, but I also want to pause in case you had any more
follow up questions. No, that's great. I really appreciate that you did
that work and that you're talking about it
in the context of, yeah, of being an advocate at a rape crisis
(16:06):
center. I think there are possibly, some listeners who
might think of that work specifically as in the domain of like the
case manager, like you said. So I just think that's great to reframe
and to see the role that an advocate from a rape crisis center
can bring to that level of advocacy. And like you said,
(16:28):
talking about the trauma of sexual violence as one way of
providing that advocacy. So I hope that people are hearing that and going,
wow, that's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, that took up most
of what the advocacy would be, would be having conversations. You're sort
of like a mediator in a sense, sometimes, explaining to the landlord,
(16:52):
like, it's like, it's not that simple that they were not just fighting,
this was domestic violence and this is what domestic violence is.
This is what it looks like. And this is different ways that it
shows up. Like, and so, yeah, let's hopefully like folks hear that this
is a great way to be able to safety plan with the survivor.
Thanks. And I know that groups were also part of your advocacy work
(17:17):
in this partnership. Could you talk about just like the structures of the
groups? What did those groups look like? Yeah. So that year,
when I was an advocate was the year of support groups.
I had so many support groups I was facilitating at the time.
I had the one at the youth homeless shelter.
I had a couple at the justice center, at the jail,
(17:41):
there was the LGBTQIA group as well. So that was the year of
my groups. A lot of them were structured very similarly. So the way
that I would do it at the shelter,
there was about once a week, I think it was maybe Thursday,
I think it was like Tuesday, Thursday. We would have the time,
(18:01):
I would have my flyers that I created and set up throughout the
shelter. So folks were aware of the group and the time,
what room we were meeting in. And if I had a particular theme
or topic that I wanted us to kind of get into,
and that would be based off of what I was basically here,
got them gossip about, or what we discussed in the previous
(18:24):
group, I would maybe set the theme around those types of things around
like consent, around healthy relationships. We would talk about
hygiene and things like that, like whatever that they needed to kind of
focus on to help get us in some of the conversations they needed
to talk about around trauma. And so I would have those flyers. We'd meet
(18:45):
about once a week for about an hour, hour and a half.
I read it as a peer led group. And so I would be
facilitator to kind of bring the group together. We would ground and center
around the topic. We would do temperature checks. So it was like,
I'll ask them what the rain cloud was or something like that.
(19:06):
And they get them started on talking about things that they had going
on and what their sun, their rainbow was, or the sun, sunny thing
was. So I think that's going really well for them, something that's not
going so well. And then we start getting into it. And that
was pretty effective for them to get talking.
Yeah. So I think that's the main structure for it.
(19:29):
We facilitated sometimes like more, I would say...
Informal kind of spaces as well. So not necessarily support groups where
we'll have them coming together and trying to help them sort of like discuss
deep problems and solve problems. But sometimes we'd also
(19:50):
break from that and do more of like a social kind of space
where they can kind of just like hang out and be more vulnerable
together versus like, when they're out in the greater space where they don't
really know each other, they kind of have had like contact with one
another in certain kind of spaces, but they ended up pulling them together
to have the social space as well was pretty beneficial for me to
(20:12):
build trust with them, for them to understand me, someone that they could
work with. I also wanna note that I was, I think 23 or
24 at the time when I was doing this. So there was also
that level where I had to kind of like connect with them a
certain way so they understood me as a service provider and not just
another person in the shelter. That's really helpful, and I wanna
(20:36):
make sure I'm framing this a little bit for our listeners.
We're talking about partnerships that can help reach and provide services
to men. And I think that probably the services that you're talking about
were not gender specific but in the course of doing this partnership and
(20:56):
in the course of having a relationship with the LGBTQIA young people at
the shelter, you were serving people of all genders, including men.
And so I think that's a really important way to think about this
because sometimes when we're in a space when we're talking about like, what
are services for men it's easy to kind of consider those as
(21:22):
gender specific or like only for men, but no, that in fact does
not have to be like that. The groups
that you're describing right now, for example, I assume were all genders,
men, women, non binary, young people. And so, yeah, I don't know if
you want to say anything more about that, but like, I think that's
(21:44):
really cool and intentional that here, we're talking about
working with men, but we're not talking about only working with men or having
like a gender segregated space necessarily. Yeah, that's a good observation.
Yeah, many of the spaces were open to all genders to join.
I think that's something that a lot of folks maybe they shy away
(22:04):
from when they're thinking about designing and building support groups for
men is the idea that these groups can't be co ed some rape crisis centers,
many rape crisis centers already have some form of support group or ancillary
service where they're providing some sort of social space or space for survivors
to get together, process emotions, talk about different social emotional
(22:27):
learning, healing, connect with each other, connect to services
that men cannot be a part of those spaces too, if women are
a part of those spaces or folks who are trans can't be a
part of those spaces. If folks who are CIS are in those spaces
and realistically everyone benefits the most when our spaces are more diverse.
(22:51):
We learn more from one another. We see our own humanity better.
We see each other's humanity better. We understand that these experiences,
although not normal, and although prevalent are not unique, that you're
not alone. That there are others who have had this experience,
even people that you'd never imagine like, oh my gosh, like this person
(23:15):
who was, there's a man who's big and buff and strong and like, looks like
he can, he just eats weights all day
can experience sexual violence or experience abuse and have his consent
violated. Like these things are myths. Like, so like yeah, absolutely these
spaces welcome all genders. Sometimes it was just
(23:36):
a men's only space, but that wasn't necessarily on purpose or set to
be that way. Sometimes it was just a men's only space.
Sometimes it was just a women's only space and it's just depending on like
who attended at the time. But yeah, I actually found the most success
at having men join those spaces when they were
(23:57):
multiple genders, and that was at the youth homeless shelter.
Despite all the other support groups I had, that was the one where we
had the most diversity. Yeah. Thanks for saying that. And
speaking of the other support groups, I don't know, well, I know that
your experience doing this group helped you kind of think about new models
(24:18):
of doing other forms of outreach. And is, are those other support groups
what you're talking about? Or is there more to those like launching those
other models of doing different forms of outreach?
Tell us a little bit more about that. A little bit.
So it kind of gave, started the like a co located model of
(24:39):
building pipelines between agencies. So even though like, so I mentioned
earlier that we... I was not the only one at that space who
was co located. And so although this was removing a lot of barriers
for survivors to access services, it also created
(25:00):
unintentional barriers on being able to provide services where
we were all going back to different agencies and maybe we were working
with one person and I was working with someone who was in a
support group, and then we had someone else from a job or family
services who was helping them with landlord work, working with this person
(25:20):
as well, who's co located, and then there's their case manager who was
working with multiple folks who may not always be present. And so
having those barriers sometimes and being able to
stay connected to each other and have like a really fully fully comprehensive
way of providing services wasn't always there. So the model that kind of
(25:44):
came from that was like, what does it look like to build more
of a pipeline. Where we aren't necessarily just like guessing where survivors
need to go when they call one of our agencies, but we have
maybe like a standard practice of like, hey, you are first line of
defense of like, take good care of these needs for someone.
(26:06):
And then we send you to the next agency and then we send
you to this agency. And then we know that if we need training,
we'll call these folks and they have advocates who are able to do
that training. And so that ideal world, that's something that we already
do. And in some degree, we are doing that. But sometimes folks just do not
(26:29):
have the capacity with programs when they're smaller.
Some programs only have like 4 or 5 advocates. And so saying like, let's
build all of these systems between agencies might sound easy and simple,
but it's not always that simple. But to know like, yeah,
trying to build those pipelines where you have multiple points of contact
(26:49):
at an agency, it's not just one person. The how you all work
together, you're thinking about sustainability. So that with someone, the
retention is kind of low on our field. Sometimes it's between two to
three years. What happens when that advocate leaves and they've been working
with these survivors or they've been running these support groups or they've
(27:09):
been building these programs and developing these outreach pipelines and
these networks with other agencies. It's like that one goes away so does
that connection, so does that collaboration. So building that stronger foundation
of outreach where we know as agencies we have each other's back and
we know how we're going to have each other's back. And so that's kind
(27:31):
of where I started working with that. I was pretty successful at creating
those connections. It kind of put me into the track of training a
bit closer because I got my foot in the door by providing trainings. That
was my way of getting my foot in the door with agencies to
build those pipelines. I will call, connect with multiple people and offer
(27:53):
to train their full staff on services and then go from there.
Great. So many great things I think that many different listeners can
connect to maybe a new way of thinking about something they're already trying
to do, or I think you're also offering things that a lot of
people might be hearing for the first time. So really appreciate you reflecting
(28:15):
on that work that you did in your old role and how
the partnership wasn't just the partnership, it was all these other things
too. It helped build your partnerships and relationships with more agencies
and thinking of sustainability and those pipelines of outreach.
So thanks for thinking back and walking us through how that all worked
(28:39):
and how you saw it being effective. Is there anything else that you
wanted to talk about today with our listeners?
I would want to add to remember that,
we all have something to offer. When you're thinking about building partnerships
and connections that sometimes we might be discriminatory about who we feel
(29:01):
like are able to provide us services, provide us valuable collaboration,
and it's good to have discernment and it's very good to like know
what your goals are and your objectives so that we're, because time is
the most precious currency. We don't have time to just be doing anything
and everything. But also to, remember that relationships are the most important
(29:22):
thing about this work, that connecting with people is the most important
thing about this work, and it's our collective humanity. And so all partnerships
can be good partnerships. I believe in, and I've been working on this
a little bit of decolonizing love. So essentially that you know even if
(29:42):
partnerships are not such good partnerships, there is maybe... If there's
room for transformation, find ways to transform those partnerships because
at the end of the day our mission is to end violence,
it is to serve survivors of violence, and so
we owe it to them and to ourselves for a better society
(30:02):
to allow for that room for transformation when necessary. So relationship
building is critical and key. And so yeah, I just wanted to add
that. Thanks. I think that's a perfect place to leave this conversation.
Yeah, Thanks for this, Jayvon. This was great. It was really great to
talk with you today. And to our listeners, thank you for listening to
(30:24):
this episode of Resource On The Go. For more resources and information about
understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual assault, visit our website
at nsvrc.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc
respecttogether.org.
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