Friday, June 18, 1999
Women get new refuge from abuse
Home to be haven in a crisis
BY SUSAN VELA
The Cincinnati Enquirer
A homelike setting for abused women is what the Women's Crisis Center wants to provide with a $1.5 million campaign that will officially kick off in the next month.
The Covington-based agency already has purchased a $100,000 four-bedroom house in Newport, which they hope to gut, revamp and open by February.
It is to house up to 18 women and children a night, and it will replace a Highland Heights shelter located in a commercial building.
The Women's Crisis Center has wanted to move into a residential setting for some time, but the need to do so was heightened after the Highland Heights facility, which the center had been leasing, went under new ownership and the lease was not renewed, said Joyce McNeely, development director at the Women's Crisis Center.
The new Newport shelter “will be more welcoming. It will be more secure,” Ms. McNeely said. “We want to provide a welcoming atmosphere for the women and children, especially the children. It's very traumatic for them. We don't want them to feel like it's an institution. The moms and children will be able to share the same bedroom.”
Women's Crisis Center now has two shelters: in Highland Heights and Maysville. Together, they provide shelter to about 500 women and children a year. The average stay is for two weeks.
An unnamed survivor of domestic violence said others like her will appreciate the new shelter. The Covington businesswoman fled to the Highland Heights facility in 1994, after her new husband, also a businessman, began physically abusing her.
While there, she found herself sifting through all these questions: What had happened? What should she do? Where should she go next?
“The huge majority (of the women) are scared,” the Boone County woman said. “Your life is disrupted. There are so many decisions to make. In the comfort of a homelike setting, you still have to make those decisions. But maybe it would make them less frightening.”
The Women's Crisis Center is 23 years old. Its Highland Heights shelter has been open for 12 years.
The move will be the shelter's fourth.
The glory of purchasing the Newport home, Ms. McNeely said, is that this move can be the shelter's last.
Executive Director Mary Jo Davis said that the center now leases the Highland Heights space on a month-to-month basis. Because there's always the chance that the new owners will give them a 30-day notice to vacate, she's now making plans with a Northern Kentucky convent to house abused women if that happens and the new shelter isn't complete. The center's staff would not reveal the exact location of its shelters, including the proposed one, because the abused women's partners are bound to become enraged and try to track them down, they said.
The center has raised about $500,000, through grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, General Mills and Levi Strauss, for its $1.5 million campaign.
“A new shelter is vital to the safety and well-being of the women and children of Northern Kentucky,” said Carl Melcher, chair of the center's Board of Directors. “As a community organization, we are 100 percent committed to a new shelter.”
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