community and do amazing things today we're taking just all a twist out of earlier carping and i have to amazing guest in my studio they are going to be telling us the community they serve and people who benefit the services they provide so today i have patricia hart she is the executive director of women worker and always interested in women's issues and so i was really pleased to be able to to come to woman's face and be able to make a difference in a popular with a population that i felt so committed to weakness a whole lot of different types of stories in incidents yeah one of the things that's really nice about having that long tenure with an organization is that you can address issues as they arise as life changes twenty two years ago life was extremely different at one space not just we had two computers that's it now we have computers that every desk and cell phones  of the internet and all that that involves in terms of our work stocking and oh i don't need a yes so the technology that's just one aspect right that we've seen a huge shift and so we've had to change the way we work with our clients we have to not just talk about safety planning in terms of do you have your important papers do you have the clues you need do you have somewhere to go but we also now have to look at technology and save do you do you have a cell phone does someone know about access to it do you have a computer or is perhaps there some was an access so so that's just one aspect of a huge change in twenty years but throughout those twenty two years we've been able to address a lot of different issues with very diverse as you say population mostly learning from them you know you have that's that's true that's you know we want to help but we are the expert in everyone and everything so we listen to what the needs are and then try to fill those needs and that's all advocacy organization which with a membership about thirty domestic violence programs across the state which include organizations fucks like women space that provide the crisis emergency services to victims and their families in every county i've been at the coalition for about a year at this point i've been working in the domestic violence field for fifteen years i had the opportunity to work with two of our other member programs in that time and i started as a court based victim advocate in washington d c when i was there getting my master's degree in public you would organization as finding the unique publication well i think one of the ways is to really stay in tune to what's going on and so we are goal is to be as present as we possibly can be and as accessible as we possibly can be are our regional growth was around programming so an emergency shelter which is accessible twenty four seven twenty four hour hotline to be operated three of them that are accessible twenty four seven transitional  housing nonresidential counseling so trying to a lot of community education of course and volunteer response to the police departments our response teams respond to every police department in mercer county and and also the colleges and the state police so it's how do you possibly be in as many places as you can be and then that it's understanding the unique population so starting out with no one who spoke spanish and recognizing we needed to do a better job in the latino population and so the way we do that and i think the most successful way to do that with any population is partnering with and you know organization and then doing that and that community begins to trust you and they begin to understand that you really want to serve them in the way that they need to be served listen to them what do you need and and and so in that particular instance we've gone from a part time counselor to a third of our counselors who speak spanish and i see that a third of our population is latino so so it's that working with the homeless and knowing that's a huge problem now and then and children are homeless are homeless the largest percentage of them homeless today domestic violence so how do we address the homeless population that's also experiencing domestic violence where we partner with them from and we do that they serve the homeless we do domestic violence and we  population comes into our community our community as i'm sure you know has changed you know and are interested s here and we need to be able to meet the needs of everyone so the diversity of our staff is really important to that i dries a whole lot of new initiatives and programs and i know women space has been doing a wonderful job and given that long history and did the number of programs that you guys  was more of a personal this was a personal experience and i thought why not why do we not have to have clients we know that there are deaf individuals out there and what do we what do we need to do to be able to reach out to the deaf community and think the coalition started several years ago to begin to explore accessibility in the deaf community and brought in and brought on  gentleman from the division of deaf and hard of hearing and give all of our programs t t y and training on how to use that and at the time that was the state of the art in terms of the  know and the coalition was at the forefront of saying we need to do this why and so and as with everything else it changes so absolutely no one's calling the wise anymore and now i'm saying what's going on we need to figure this out and and somewhat like the model we used with the latino we needed to work with the deaf community and so the new jersey coalition to and domestic violence the new jersey coalition against sexual assault women space division of deaf and hard of hearing have been very supportive of new jersey association of the deaf all of us working together representatives from the to begin to develop what has become our deaf advocacy project ok and the goal is to both train domestic violence and sexual salt agencies because this is you know i am a domestic violence sexual assault agency i'm not personally but i am a part of and i think oh we're doing a great job but until we ask the deaf community what do they need we may not be d effective a job as we need to so that's what we started doing started listening what we need to do so we started to train the domestic violence and central saw programs on the accessibility on the deaf community because there's a culture just like us every nationality and every his religion and every there's a kind of culture that is involved and with the deaf community it's the same so we've all learned a lot about what the deaf community is all about  and and that in listening to the three of the women on our committee are deaf listening to them we developed a plan to train deaf individuals so we recruited and train see unique barriers to be a deaf person may howl in a domestic violence situation than anyone like you and me so what would be those challenges so different one it's a very closed community so there's not a lot of confidentiality people know what's going on if you go somewhere to go how people are going to know that you're going somewhere that is a huge deterrent many times they don't want people to know what's going on and so unfortunately is true with most people want to keep that secret but if you are deaf just literally you have no voice you have no voice and so you can't scream out you can yell for help you can't you can't call nine one one because nine one one is a telephone you can't so if you're in a crisis do you really have time to call or relay service to call nine one one usually not so just that alone is very restrictive in order to get the help they need they can always do the things we take for granted pick up the phone call nine one one question i do want to feel you should comment on it and maturity of the people and the only times or in general population of people tend to hoard inside not share the domestic violence situation or those that emotional abuse turns more threatening we have a tendency to kind of sweep that under the rug or we don't identify it as being a symptom of a pattern of more controlling and abusive behavior so yes i think that you know including the deaf community there probably is that assumption or a belief or i think that if we think of relationships to where the victim is hard of hearing or deaf and you have there with a hearing partner some of that emotional abuse may be triggered or the abusive partner is using the victim's disability as the excuse to degrade them to demean them possibly to call them names to restrict their contacts to the community to further isolate  them so i do think unfortunately though broadly in our community we still don't identify emotional and mental abuse as the abuse that it is and the power and control that it tends to illustrate and relationships until it gets on top unfortunately know that there's help exists well i have to say i think that was one of the poignant things about pat taking on this project and really leading it because as she said you know prior to this many years prior to this going back probably more than ten years  the coalition had been doing work with the division of hard of hearing and the deaf you know she said we equipped all of our programs with t t y phones we had been for about five to ten years doing cross training where we as domestic violence advocates were going out and training providers in the deaf community they were in we were inviting them into our programs to train domestic violence staff on how to be more sensitive and culturally competent to to victims and survivors coming from the deaf community but there was still a disconnect you know we had in our minds created the infrastructure the education the the tools to hopefully engage and encourage that community to contact us but as she said those t t y phones were ringing you know we weren't necessarily getting that response and again statistically we knew that there were victims and survivors out there not getting services and so you know how important it is to have advocates that are representative of those communities to be available to go out into those communities and to meet victims where they are and where they're seeking out help really helps to bridge that gap i think as opposed to just creating the system and creating the infrastructure and waiting for them to come to us how much it has changed and that  training our advocates and we're looking to them to be our emissaries in the deaf community i see you know if we think about ourselves we're more comfortable with someone who is like us yes that doesn't mean we discriminate it simply means that there's a comfort level if just language is american sign language if you sign to communicate it's so much more comfortable for you to share information to be if you're in crisis to be able to talk to someone who speaks everyone which is something that we've learned and so we want we want them to be our spokes person to say this is a safe place to be however in order to be considered a safe place we need also to look at ourselves are we doing so we changed what we operate three hotlines we now have a texting hotline so if you're deaf you can text now you can also call through a  way people communicate these days and we thought that would make it easier we thought we were doing a great job we were very sensitive we were really doing good until a deaf woman came to our front door rang the doorbell because all the programs are locked the secretary talked through the intercom and said can i help you and wondered why no one to answer and so we weren't being as effective here she is our front door and she can't hear she can't hear the buzzer she can't hear the secretary luckily she went around to the back door and started banging on the door which i really appreciate that she did that but that was a big eye opener for us and i think that no matter how committed you are and how much you think you know unless you're asking and saying how can we help you how can we be more accessible so there are simple things to do to make yourself more accessible in addition to all the other things that are you know very important to do to respond so that's a very good example you know or something that you find that ok you know we can go into the basics but there's still a lot needed i think a part of it is letting folks know what they're responsible to do so if you're serving the deaf community you need to provide interpreters it's not the deaf person that will get those calls so who pays for the interpreter the deaf person it's not the deaf person so if they need legal help then there needs to be an interpreter to be able to make that happen and a lot of that becomes the challenge for for everyone how to make sure that you have the interpreter need so that people can communicate effectively so i don't i think a part of how i want to answer is the job is never done because we keep learning how to be better or we're trying to do and hopefully that will never stop but we do you know we do have to be willing to acknowledge when we're maybe not doing would talk about interpreters and i'm sure that being such a diverse community here throughout new jersey you might have violent world into creator cetera so if  and contact information if you needed community suborder what would that be well one of the things that has been very interesting about this project is there's no funding for it so all of us who are working on it on the committee are doing it in our spare time i say we continue to do that we started to go  you know we use that money to pay for interpreters for training we've gotten small grants the coalition had access to small grant the beginning we received a small grant provide kwok so we've gotten some small grants but we've not had kind of wide support so we really look to the community to help support what i think to be is a critical project to deal with one of one of the things that i started to do was look at the numbers and according to their there's their census data in new jersey we have about sixty nine thousand deaf individuals not counting institutionalized not counting the elderly who are just who are of the heart of hearing and so if you look at the statistics on domestic violence you are talking about it one in four and if you look at the research related to vulnerable populations such as death it's higher it's higher it's much higher so it's as much as double yet so supposing we even use the smaller amount which is one in four we still have about seventeen thousand but it's one thing to have clients come to our programs and receive the services of our programs but so many of our advocates help connect victims and survivors to the systems and services outside of ourselves and it's really critical to have advocates that are knowledgeable about what's available what that victim has a right to that services should be providing interpreters that when they go to court that's something that they should expect to have when they go to the police department and so if you're by yourself as a victim or survivor you may not know that or you just may not have the strength of the courage or the ability for whatever reason to be able to advocate for those things and so sometimes having a train advocate especially one from your own community can be really helpful and to make that process more efficient more effective for that victim or survivor but we've been so not only pleased with the work that pat's done but appreciative that she really has had an interest in spreading it out beyond mercer county beyond woman space and has really striving to make this a statewide initiative she's been sharing this information with all of the members through our different forums and the different work that we're doing on the trainings ensuring that we're offering the trainings regionally so it's not just something that you need to come to mercer county to receive but she's worked with us in the member programs to make sure that we're hosting this in different parts of the state so that we doing gauge interested individuals in the community who have a desire to help agency it's an eighty hour domestic violence sexual violence training and so we train on all the dynamics related to those different violence and abuses the services the legal aspects of it safety planning and so that's available to anybody who has an interest and you know as we've talked a little bit about individuals from all different parts of the community and representative of all different communities are welcome to participate in those processes and certainly training them if you're working with a deaf and dumb or a survivor and you yourself don't know as south just as we would train around needing to provide services across all different languages making sure they know how to access interpreters know how to access language lines or whatever the service might be that's particular to that victim or survivor would be part of that training of our programs if not all respond to team vet summer programs even provide services to teen perpetrators of dating violence but it's all part of that continuum right and so don't domestic violence probably started off earlier on in that person's  lifetime sometimes it starts as child abuse that they've experienced oftentimes that leads to dating violence and then later on adult mastic violence so we do see it as an important population to serve because we see that not only important to address the violence they're experiencing now but