IOLA — A community responding to an uptick in domestic violence cases in the mid-1980s began an organization that has grown and now reaches into four counties and beyond to offer help and find resources for families and children impacted by abuse.
Hope Unlimited is based in Iola where it has its child advocacy center and offers other services, including an emergency shelter for families in crisis, outreach services and a visitation and child exchange center for supervised court ordered visits and a neutral, secure site for parents to transfer children from one parent to another.
The shelter helps on average 49 women and 22 children a year. The child visitation center sees 249 visits or exchanges a year. The child advocacy center assists with 73 child forensic interviews per year. The crisis hotline, 1-888-3632287, gets 611 calls per year, according to Hope Unlimited.
Teen dating violence is another issue for advocates at Hope because one in three teens will experience physical, sexual or emotional abuse from someone with whom they have a relationship. Nearly half of U.S. college women (43%) report experiencing violent or abusive dating behaviors.
Donita Garner, children advocacy center coordinator, said Hope staff travel to area schools and community events to share the agency’s services and to have conversations with teens about dating violence.
Garner said staff also help children and adults with the court process and forensic exams for victims of sexual assault. See HOPE, Page 3.
The first year of Hope was 1984 and the mission is to help battered women and their children, offer support groups and therapy and consultation. Law enforcement, social workers, mental health providers, prosecutors and others are involved in the services and coordination efforts.
This multidisciplinary approach benefits families and children and assures their cases get as much attention as possible.
“(We) take families as kind of a full court press to get them the justice they need,” Garner said.
Hope is nearing the end of a capital campaign (they’ve raised $2.5 million of the $3 million goal) for a new shelter because of the limited capacity of the current facility, which can hold 10 to 12 people.
“Because we’ve stayed full for several years. It’s just been nonstop for us,” Garner said.
Hope is in four counties, Allen, Neosho, Anderson and Wilson, but it has served families outside of those counties for convenience because of clients’ work or school.
She said over the last four decades — she’s worked there 27 years — Hope Unlimited has experienced an increase in cases of domestic violence.
“But only because I think it’s an awareness that there is help available. So it’s not necessarily that there’s been an increase in the cases. …” Jon Miller, community engagement advocate for Hope, said he enjoyed the school visits to talk to students about what healthy and abusive relationships look like.
“It was really cool to see how they actually engage with it,” Miller said.
He hopes that the discussions will bring awareness so the students or that their friends could recognize abusive relationships and get away from them.
The goal is for all students in the counties served to have heard of Hope by the time they graduate.
Garner said October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and Hope continues to share a message of prevention and awareness. She wants people to recognize these abusive relationships before they get too involved or to recognize them in their friends so they can get help.
“Prevention is better than having to address the situation later on,” she said.
Hope Unlimited has 21 employees, including parttime employees and the Sexual Assault Response Team, which is on-call staff. The program gets funding from state and federal grants and private donations.
