Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

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Welcome to Lakeland Currents.

I'm your host Todd Haugen.

Our guest today is from the Northwoods Battered Women's Shelter of Bemidji.

She is the Board Chair and her name is Rebecca Stone.

Rebecca welcome back to Lakeland Currents.

Thank you so much, it's wonderful to be back.

You came to visit with us last year.

We did.

And at that time we were talking about the exciting times for the Northwoods Coalition for Battered Women because of the new building that was going to be broken ground for.

Yeah we were just getting ready to break ground and today is moving day.

Wow now as we record this show you're moving into the new shelter when people are watching this you will have been in there for a few weeks but it's going to be I mean I would assume a lengthy settling in process.

It is.

Just because we're moving in doesn't mean we're totally done, there's a couple of different things that are happening.

One is it's spring right, and we live in northern Minnesota, so there's some work that has to happen outdoors that we're going to have to wait for the ground to thaw, you know, building fences and landscaping and all of those sorts of things are going to have to wait but it is substantially complete enough that we can start serving people in the new facility and get out of our old facility which, you know, we talked about last time isn't accessible to people with disabilities, the capacity was too small.

The advocates who are working there are sharing one desk, eight of them, so now we're going to have room to spread out and serve people better.

We're going to be able to double, we are doubling our capacity from four rooms to eight rooms, it's really exciting.

We've got a lot of work to do in the next few months but it's here.

Now the building that you've been in all these years since what 1979?

Yes that is when the building was purchased.

It was an old building when it was purchased.

Right.

The idea I think initially from speaking to some people who were on the board at that time or affiliated at that time was that it was going to be a temporary home and it's been the home for you know 46 years.

Will the shelter keep that building and keep using it for something?

No we will likely once we're moved out and have transitioned we will sell that building yeah.

So last time we talked about all the people that sadly have to be turned away because you haven't had the capacity.

You have more capacity now but you may still not have quite enough.

Well sadly we're never going to work, I'm afraid we'll never work ourselves out of a job.

You know poverty and intimate partner violence are not going to be solved anytime soon.

You know I also do this for my day job as an attorney with legal services of Northwest Minnesota and we have a sad job security in this.

That said, serving as many people as we can with as much dignity as humanly possible, we will continue to strive to do and if someday we can work ourselves out of a job then that would be amazing.

So the new building more about what the shelter does in a few minutes but the new building how did that come to be, like for instance the site where did that come from?

So the property the organization has owned for a long time, many many decades even, and so I believe this was really someone else's this vision had started again and again because this is something that we've known for decades that we needed and so one of the you know previous boards had the foresight to purchase this particular piece of property and it ends up being you know exactly right for what we needed and so part of that process, you know, started I think back in the 1980s with the purchase of this property.

And then about 8 years ago the board at the time started basically a kind of a search prospect, process, to try and figure out what we wanted.

Right you have to start with the vision and we toured a number of different shelter facilities across the state of Minnesota and into North Dakota and really asked the staff there if you had to do it all over again what would you do different and what would you do the same and then we had a charette process which was an architect came in and we gave her all these incredible ideas and the next day she came with sketches and we used those sketches to start the capital campaign.

And then Covid slowed everything down, put it all to a screeching halt like everything else, and so we came back after shutdown and started the capital campaign.

We had an incredible capital campaign committee led by Kay Mack and they helped us raise nearly $4 million to build this building.

We've had fundraisers, we've had just an incredible outpouring from this community, which you know never surprises me in Bemidji.

Bemidji is an incredible community and that's why I chose to live here.

Yeah, lots of generous people, you know, a lot of people that maybe don't have that much but yet they're generous.

And they're so generous with their time and their expertise and even if they, you know, don't have a lot of money to give they, you know, we had donations from $5 to a million dollars, it was just phenomenal to see the outpouring of support.

And then the stories that would come through of people saying how this facility changed their lives as children when a family member was fleeing violence and they needed a place to stay and so maybe they stayed there as a child or a parent received services from them early on and how that shaped their lives, just the stories were phenomenal that we got out of just reaching out to the community and the impact that the Northwest Battered Women's Shelter has had on this community for decades and so it was really wonderful to feel that and to have that community really rally around us.

As wonderful as that capital campaign has been, when I checked your website this morning you were just ever so close to going over the top but not quite there yet.

Yes, but Kraus Anderson, our incredible contractor, has managed and the fates have made it so that we are coming in on time and under budget and that is incredible.

That said we do have a number of things that were not included in that original $4 million.

That $4 million was really for the building, so on our website right now which is www.mnshelter.org we have a wish list and an Amazon wish list and in that is things like towels and televisions for the rooms and furniture that we're going to need.

We had a donation for a lot of office furniture and a conference table and that seems like it might be going away and so we're going to have to figure out where that is going to come from now.

And so there's a lot of moving parts that yet have to happen but we've got beds and we've got computers and if we have to set up folding tables in the meantime that's what we're going to do.

People might be kind of wondering well $4 million how big is it, but at the same time building is expensive today, a lot more than it used to be, and I assume you have to have security and a variety of technological in things installed in the building.

Yeah and this isn't like building a home where it's one family who's going to stay there for a long time, this is a facility where we have to really make sure we're thinking about and planning for the worst case scenario, not the best case scenario.

So when I'm building my home I'm thinking about more of a best case scenario right.

I know that how I live in my home and I can make accommodations.

We have people who are severely traumatized and their children coming to stay and so you know I'm sure you know any parent who's had a kid who is having a rough day knows how they can be hard on something and if you add a lot of trauma to that that can be pretty hard on the so we built this place to specifications that are more in commercial grade and so this isn't like a residential home that way so that's going to add a lot of upfront costs but it's going to save a lot of money in the long run.

So having the more industrial or the commercial grade flooring and the, you know, those sorts of things because it's going to be a heavy traffic area right this is a place of business but it's also a place of healing and so it's that line of trying to make sure that it has almost institutional grade things without looking and feeling institutional.

Rebecca when you were talking about touring around Minnesota and visiting other shelters when planning this shelter I was wondering how common is it for communities like Bemidji to have a Battered Women's Shelter?

It's not terribly common for communities of this size.

We cover, you know, the next shelter over can be pretty far away.

We do have a sister organization that we work with in Red Lake and so we're pretty blessed in this area to have more services available but I think the next one over is probably Fargo or Duluth and so those are facilities that serve a larger population too and so, you know, it's not common for this and again I think that's really a testimony to the compassion of Bemidji and the people who live here and serve here.

Yet sadly the problem is very common, a lot more common than people might think because it's another thing that goes on and oftentimes you don't hear about it.

Who is served by the Northwoods Battered Women's Shelter?

So we serve not just women, we serve people of all genders.

As I said here before and I'll say a million more times, intimate partner violence doesn't discriminate and so neither do we.

Now in the new facility we'll be able to serve men and their children more easily because of the way in the old facility everyone, all four of those rooms were sharing two bathrooms, and so if you've got imagine just the chaos of sharing a bathroom in a family sometimes that's just having a rough Monday morning getting ready for school, but you know now each family unit or each room will have its own bathroom associated with it so that's really huge.

That also means that a lot of those private spaces can be more private and so we'll be able to serve people of any gender more comfortably and more safely.

We also don't just house people, we're not just a shelter, we provide assistance with just all sorts of things that have to do with safety around intimate partner violence.

So safety planning, so to help someone if they're not ready to leave but they see that there's the patterns and some fear, we can talk to them and to make a plan for if things get bad right.

So if we can all think of it in the terms of like fire drills, right.

We don't hope for a fire in a school when we were kids right or you know as teachers but we have a plan and we practice that plan and so safety planning is sort of like that it is having a plan and putting that plan in place and hoping you never ever need it.

We'll also help people with orders for protection or harassment restraining orders which are court orders that say that have criminal implications should they be violated and they allow, they basically say that this abuser must stay away from the victim or face being arrested, face criminal consequences, so we can help with those.

Also if someone if there is a criminal court proceeding going on we can help by doing some court watch, helping them understand the process.

We refer to lots of different organizations in town.

Yesterday I worked with Great River Rescue to help house some animals for a victim who needed to flee.

So we've got some great community partners too that we work with to make sure that any barrier that a victim faces we can do well at least do our best to try and address or find a community partner who is better suited to do so.

If someone watching this show feels they may be in need of services from the Northwoods Battered Women's Shelter the crisis line number, which I will repeat toward the end of the show, is 800-588-6229.

800-588-6229 is the number to call and again I'll repeat that again toward the end of the show if you missed it.

And this show will be available on the Lakeland Public Television website to watch again just in case you need that number and haven't been able to find it.

When people who are in a situation where they're being abused, even checking your website could become a problem because people learn how to check computers for history of browsing and there are quick outs if somebody is on your website they can there's a button right to click that you can get out of there quickly.

And it'll transfer you over to be fair I don't remember where it transfers for you to now I know for some organizations it sends you to a weather app and for others it sends you but it is a quick exit and it's from all of our screens and so you can just immediately pop out of there.

I also recommend that if someone is concerned that someone is that an abuser is going to look at their browser history that they use, you know, an incognito mode or something like that too so those things can't be traced that way.

And that crisis line, that 800 number, we answer that 24/7, someone is always available to take a call on the crisis line.

I think it's hard to imagine if you've not been in that situation what the control is like, what kinds of measures that person has put into place over time to try to control the behavior of the person that he or possibly she is abusing.

So that, I think, might start to maybe explain why people don't leave which I think is one of the first questions that people ask well if they're being abused why haven't they just left.

Yeah well and I always want to shift that conversation to you know I understand that the implication of wanting to say why didn't that person leave and I think I will challenge viewers today to think why did they abuse, right, to really shift that narrative in their thinking.

That said, part of the there's so many barriers to not leaving and you have to understand this abuse didn't start on day one.

You know if I went on a first date with someone and they physically assaulted me I'm not going to go on a second date right, but these things happen over time and it can be slow and it can start to you know feeling start at the beginning with you know love bombing and feeling really just like getting all this attention and feeling like you are, you know, the sun and the moon to someone.

But unfortunately that can burn too hot and too fast.

A lot of times victims will not have any access to money, the abuser will be in control of the money involved in the home, maybe they have children together and the idea of sending your kids off to, you know, parenting time with the other parent who is abusive is scarier than staying where you can kind of supervise that on your own, you can gauge their mood and you can, you know, everyone's kind of got their safety plan.

There's a dozen answers for every single person and it's so individual and so one of the things that's really important when working with people who are experiencing intimate partner violence is to listen is to first listen to not judge.

You haven't walked a mile in this person's shoes, you haven't, even if you have experienced intimate partner violence and you can empathize and understand from a personal perspective, their story is going to be different and every single person is an expert in their own life and they're an expert in their own safety and so when doing safety planning, when talking about whether or not to do an order for protection or harassment restraining order, it's imperative to start by listening and knowing if this is someone who thinks that that would be more dangerous for them to do.

Because at the end of the day it is a piece of paper, right, a harassment restraining order is it's an incredibly powerful cause of action and we are I'm a big fan when they work, but for some people they may say that actually would put me at more risk so I don't want to do that and instead this is what I think is going to keep me safe and keep my kids safe and so it's really that listening and trusting that this person is an expert in their own life.

You're not a counselor, you're a legal counselor as a lawyer, but you're not exactly a counselor that might be working directly with these victims, but for people that think that are wondering if their partner may be trending in that direction how do these things usually start, you've been doing this work a long time.

Yeah I've been a Legal Aid attorney for 11 years now, working primarily with victims of intimate partner violence, and I think for every person there's a different story and so I try not to generalize, however, there are trends that you can kind of identify.

If this person is controlling your day-to-day activities, if they are saying things like if I can't have you no one can, if they are controlling who you can be friends with, when you get to see your family, they're controlling the money, if they turn off your credit card when you're going to go do something that they don't approve of.

These are some of the key indicators of something's not right.

And so you know if you have any concern it doesn't hurt to call in on the crisis line and just talk to someone who has a lot of experience in this.

There's no judgment when you call the crisis line and it doesn't mean you have to do anything other than talk to someone you know and sometimes just having someone to talk to can really help you understand your situation.

And I'm an external processor, I need a good sounding board, my poor husband has to hear it all day every day.

But, you know, my colleagues are wonderful at being that sounding board, so we all need that, and so if you're someone who is being isolated and you feel like you don't have anyone to turn to that crisis line is there sometimes just to talk.

It doesn't have to be I am afraid for my life, it could very much be hey I'm starting to think maybe you know I'm a frog and this water is getting mighty warm and so you know things are starting to not feel right.

But it starts slow, it starts gradual, so if you're in that situation and you don't feel like you have a friend or a family member who you can reach out to, who you think you can trust with that information, or you think would be neutral for you, call that crisis line then and talk to an advocate.

Just to get in a perspective.

It starts with classic conditioning generally I mean, you know, starting slowly and I think sometimes the abuser may not even realize for sure what he or she is doing.

Well, I absolutely agree with that, and a lot of times abusers will come from a home that there was abuse and so this was the behavior that they think is normal and was modeled for them and so it doesn't make it right but it kind of helps you understand where this process comes from, it can be generational.

At Northwoods Battered Women's Shelter, especially in this new facility now as you've already mentioned, there's room for some kids, people can bring their kids along.

Yep and in the old facility too were room for kids but in the new facility there's actually going to be a playroom, so there's instead of you know just having to hide, you know, keep your kids in the room and, you know, put the TV on or something there's going to be a playroom in there and so they'll be able to do that.

There's a therapy room available so we'll have a place on site for a mental health provider to come bring services to us.

Eventually we're hoping to have a playground, that'll be the next big push for the board and for raising money and seeing where we're at after we get our last of our bills paid here and our furniture purchased, but there's some talks about some plans around a playground in the backyard and really it's going to be a much more comfortable place for kids and you know the current facility is a safe place but it doesn't mean that it's comfortable.

Right how long can people stay?

So we are a 60-day emergency shelter or emergency housing for those experiencing intimate partner violence, so it is a 60-day stay.

That said sometimes we have someone who maybe they are, you know, they got a they can have a lease in like two more weeks, you know we're going to work with them to make sure that they're that those two weeks they can either stay with us or we'll find somewhere else for them to stay in that transition period.

But if we have someone who maybe isn't working the process and you know we're not going to kick them out on the street but we are going to help them try and transition to somewhere else because we are an emergency facility, we are not a homeless shelter in the traditional sense.

We're not a long-term, you know, transitional housing, we are emergency shelter.

And, again, the money angle if people are thinking well I really need their help but I'm sure I can't afford it what's it cost?

We don't charge anything for the services we provide, we rely on grants and donations to pay our people and to keep our facility up and running so no there should be no barrier for finances and then that's why we're there is we're for the people who, you know, can't afford or have again the abuser may be holding back the money those sorts of things, too, so.

Yeah and partner organizations we work with like in my organization Legal Services we don't charge for our services to the clients either, we are 100% grant funded and well or donations yeah as well and so there are no costs incurred by the people we work with.

And given the somewhat tentative state of current federal grants that's not there's nothing kind of up in the air about your organization?

I can't really speak to what will or won't happen there because every day is a new day and I am going to focus my time, energy, and anxiety on the crisis in front of me.

I learned that a long time ago if I worry about all of the things that could happen I don't have the energy left to help people with the things that are happening.

So today we've got money to keep going.

Rebecca, the organization is currently seeking an executive director is that correct?

That is correct.

Our previous executive director her plan was to stay on until we had the new facility basically built and she did that and she had an incredible opportunity so she is off doing that and I hope Chris is having a great experience at her new job we miss her but we understand.

We are seeking a new executive director and so this person will really be seeing the vision of the next iteration of Northwoods Battered Women's Shelter.

What is the website for the organization?

It's a www.mnshelter.org.

Okay yeah so check that and you'll be able to learn all about the organization.

You will.

And if you want to make donations we have a donate button, if you want to donate supplies to the new shelter we have all of those things on there as well.

Also if you just want some information about seeking our services for yourself or some someone you love that information is all there as well.

And you will also find the crisis line number there and that line once again is 800-588-6229, 800-588- 6229.

Rebecca Stone, chair of the board for the Northwoods Battered Women's Shelter, we appreciate your time, thanks for coming in to visit with us today and we hope for lots of great times in your exciting new facility, how terrific that is.

Thank you so much and thank you for having us today.

Thank you for watching Lakeland Currents.