It’s an exciting time at Salaam Cleveland. With the successful launch of the free clinic last year Salaam Cleveland is embarking on a new enterprise – the start of a domestic violence program. Ending domestic violence is a goal towards building healthy families and creating peaceful communities and which fulfills the organization’s overall mission of promoting understanding and harmony between people. The new domestic violence program will also revive and formalize a long standing commitment by the original group of women who founded the organization to help those in need.
Violence inside the home is something private and hidden. Immigrant and refugee women often suffer from various kinds of abuse in their lives and have nowhere to turn to. Salaam Cleveland hopes to change that by offering services to support women when they are most vulnerable.
A UNODC (United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime) report called home “the most dangerous place for women”. And despite growing awareness that men, too, can be victims of domestic violence, the overwhelming majority of victims – about 85% – are still, today, women and girls.
Salaam’s vision is to provide culturally specific support services and intervention methods and address the immediate needs of women facing abuse. Salaam Cleveland decided to visit the existing network of shelters and programs in the North East Ohio region to learn about the resources available in the area and with the goal of forging connections and building partnerships. It is important to understand that in order to help victims there needs to be a coordinated community response that involves health care, law enforcement, legal and judicial systems along with more personalized services such as counselling, economic empowerment as well as more targeted needs of immigrant women such as translation and interpretation services, immigration attorneys and the like.
On a cold snowy February morning representatives from the organization visited the Hope and Healing Battered Women’s Shelter of Summit and Medina County. The Assistant Director of the shelter, Nathan Chambers gave us a tour of the well maintained facility while we peppered him with questions. Hope and Healing operates a 154 bed shelter in Akron along with a 60 bed residential house as well as transitional housing units. While their clients are predominantly women, they also have a separate wing for men. There are no barriers to the length of stay which can be as little as 2 days to as much as several months. The average duration is 90 days. The shelter provides holistic services such as job readiness training and development, legal advocacy, educational support services, family and individual counselling and youth advocacy.
An astounding fact that Mr. Chambers mentioned was that in the past two years, the number of immigrant clients has spiked from 2% to 7%. They are predominantly women from South Asia and the Middle East. We discussed the barriers women from these communities face in mainstream shelters. Hope and Healing has taken a number of steps to educate themselves, train its staff and expand it services which now incorporates immigration support services and translation and interpretation services to better serve a diverse community.
In other news, Salaam’s work with its refugee program continues in the background. The program supports a weekend school for the Somali Bantu community by supplementing the rent for a basement facility. The school serves between 40 to 80 children and is an important hub for the community’s social, educational and cultural needs.
On going needs of refugees are also met by the program. Recently, a person was helped in obtaining a driver’s license and contribution towards buying a car was made for another. While these are small measures they are important steps to place people on the path to self-sufficiency.
