On Monday (3/13), GOH visited the Urban Resource Institute (URI) in New York, the largest domestic abuse placement agency in the United States. Since its inception in 1980, URI has been committed to providing innovative services and empowerment programs to help disadvantaged communities in New York City and to break down a culture and system of inherent inequality so that the needs of those who seek help are met. They currently have 14 shelters in New York City, nine of which accommodate survivors with pets. With 35 years of service experience, URI has provided many shining lights in our efforts to serve and support survivors of domestic violence.
This time, GOH is honored to be received and introduced by URI’s executive leadership team, including the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Program Officer (CPO), Director of Quality Improvement, Evaluation, and Training, Director of Prevention services, and Director of domestic violence shelter and legal assistance services, and to help answer our questions about URI’s four innovative services. These four innovative services include Economic Empowerment, Quality Improvement, Evaluation, and Training, the Abusive Partner Intervention program (APIP), and People and Animals Living Safely (PALS).
URI has been providing economic empowerment services for survivors since the 1990s and provides individualized and demand-oriented job matching on a case-by-case basis. They provide a lot of Job Readiness, including soft strength training such as workplace response and customer service, and work with many partners to find suitable work areas so that these survivors can start working and move on to independent paths. Beyond that, URI believes, “If you can hold a job for a year, you can hold it for a lifetime.” So during the first year of their work, the survivors will be assisted by several URI services, including counseling, life guidance, and other services to ensure that they can excel in the workplace and achieve financial independence. We were also honored to visit URI’s FabLab, a well-equipped digital manufacturing lab created by MIT to provide URI students and youth with an opportunity to learn about digital manufacturing and explore their interests.
URI is so focused on program Quality Improvement, Evaluation, and Training that in 2018 a special unit was set up to conduct quality assessment and training across the organization. The purpose of establishing this unit is to: 1. Ensure that the program is implemented in the direction originally planned; 2. Whether there are areas for improvement in the program or whether personnel need to be trained; 3. Ensure that the voice of front-line personnel reaches management and provides better assistance to front-line personnel; 4. Collect and organize the information and data of program evaluation and provide it to the stakeholders for reference. URI’s focus on the training of professionals has been recognized and even recognized by the government as a course provider of continuing education in social work so that more people and organizations can learn from URI’s experience and expertise.
In addition to providing services to survivors of domestic violence, URI is also committed to providing an Abusive Partner Intervention program (APIP) through restorative justice and trauma-informed care. Through cooperation with the New York District Attorney, referrals victims of domestic abuse cases to URI for the treatment services they provide, through group work, counseling, and using restorative justice work methods to provide a safe environment in which victims can face and take responsibility for their past harm. URI knows that there are many challenges and pressures along the way, but they believe that APIP services are an important part of reducing domestic violence cases. Therefore, the focus is not on blaming and punishing the abusive partner, but on raising questions so that they can start self-examination and reflection to truly eliminate the occurrence of violence.
Finally, we were honored to visit URI’s first innovative People and Animals Living Safely (PALS) shelter in Brooklyn and learn that up to 48 percent of survivors in the United States choose to remain in a violent environment because they cannot take their pets with them to the shelter. With this in mind, URI created an environment where people and animals can co-exist in the shelter and provide all pet-related services. They believe that pets are already family members for survivors, so they provide pet food, snacks, and supplies for survivors free of charge, and provide professional services such as medical diagnosis and birth control for pets through the animal protection association. While the PALS shelters will only provide shelter for survivors for up to six months, they will help survivors register their pets as Emotional Support Animals so they can continue to have their pets around when they are transferred to other homes in the future.
After a full day’s visit, GOH and the speakers from Singapore and Hong Kong were very impressed with the services provided by URI. We believe that URI not only provides innovative services but also remembers the importance of meeting the needs of the people it originally serves. Not only did we learn a lot, but we also thought about how to break down the cultural barrier and replicate the URI experience in Asia. But we look forward to putting into what we’ve learned from URI in innovating services and bringing our services closer to the needs of survivors to truly achieve our vision of preventing and ending gender-based violence.
