Big Changes at the Women’s Resource Center

The overhaul of an agency that exists to stand between violence and vulnerable people who have nowhere else to turn has left some wondering what’s happening at the Women’s Resource Center in Traverse City.

Staff has turned over, and some former employees and supporters don’t like the direction the Women’s Resource Center Grand Traverse Area (WRC) has taken. They worry that cost-cutting and a business-like approach has come at the expense of the clients who depend on the non-profit, a critical safety net for women and children who face physical or sexual abuse.

The WRC’s executive director and its board president, however, say that difficult choices were necessary to save a flagging organization that had fallen into debt due to mismanagement.

RAISING CONCERN

The nonprofit’s new streamlined direction has been bumpy.

The Northern Express talked to numerous former employees, representatives of organizations partnered with the nonprofit, and people who work in the criminal justice system who raised doubts about leadership of the WRC since a new executive director, Juliette Schultz, took over in 2013.

Most only would air their concerns off the record.

Bob Wheaton, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees domestic and sexual violence service providers, acknowledged there is worry about the direction of the agency.

“We are aware that some have raised concerns regarding the Women’s Resource Center-Grand Traverse Area and are working with leadership on improvements to make sure that individuals in the Traverse City area who have suffered due to abuse receive the services they need and deserve,” Wheaton said in an email.

One of the fundamental roles the WRC fulfills has not faltered since Schultz took over, said 86th District Court Judge Thomas J. Phillips.

Phillips said that without the agency, it would be impossible to run the domestic violence court, a program that seeks to stem the domestic violence cycle by ensuring swift prosecution of mis-demeanor cases.

“From my point of view, they are providing the court with the services we need,” Phillips said. “It’s very important the Women’s Resource Center stays viable for the community and for the court.”

Phillips said the agency always has been responsive to the needs of the court, whether under Schultz or its former executive director, Jo Bullis.

DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS

A clue to understanding the concerns regarding the direction of the WRC exists in the gulf between Schultz and Bullis.

Bullis, who died last year, was an in-thetrenches lawyer who spent years fighting for women who had no voice. She worked under an early WRC executive director, Mary Lee Lord, a beloved steward of the organization.

Schultz has a business and marketing background. She studied communications and earned a journalism degree at Ferris State University. However, other than having a personal passion about the issue and serving on the WRC board prior to being named executive director, she doesn’t have on-the-ground experience helping women who are abused.

The WRC board selected Schultz from a group of three finalists who applied for the position; the other two had decades of experience in domestic violence services; one of the candidates had run women’s resource centers elsewhere in the state.

Ralph Soffredine, the WRC board president, said the board decided Schultz was the best candidate despite her lack of experience in the domestic violence field.

“We felt, as a group that was interviewing, that she was the best qualified, although some of the other people that were interviewed were good too,” he said. “I mean, they had some real experiences and so forth, but when it came down to the rubber hitting the road, she was our choice.”

BIG, BIG CHANGES

Schultz said that when she took over, she needed to make some changes in order to ensure the nonprofit’s future.

The WRC’s mission was narrowed. Some staff were let go. Some left in protest; others were brought in. One of those new hires, Constance Babb, WRC’s lead client advocate, said she signed on a year ago because of the change that Schultz stood for.

“I heard that the agency was making drastic changes, and I thought that was pretty interesting, so I met with a few people and I said, ‘What’s going on at the WRC?’ and they told me, ‘You’re not going to believe it — they’re really making these changes. And they’re really client-centered,’” Babb said. “So then I met with Juliette … And she says, ‘Constance, I’ll tell ya.’ She says, ‘I wanna see this be the most beneficial program in the state of Michigan for women, children and their families.’ And I said, ‘Do you think that’s possible?’ and she said, ‘I know it is.’ And I said, ‘Count me in.’” Soffredine said change was necessary because the agency had fallen into financial trouble, and employees were not well supervised.

“For one thing, people were coming and going whenever the hell they wanted to,” Soffredine said. “We had some people who were in supervision, who were not supervising … I remember saying one time, ‘Why in the hell are we paying this person $50,000, and they’re only doing one thing? It’s ridiculous.”

Soffredine said blowback to the kind of changes enacted by Schultz is only natural.

“When people leave — sometimes by their own choice and sometimes with a nudge — when people leave, sometimes they leave with baggage,” he said.

“PEOPLE NOT DOING THEIR JOBS”

Soffredine said that around the time Schultz took over, the board learned the agency was running a $230,000 deficit.

“It came from people not doing their job,” Soffredine said. “They weren’t putting the proper paperwork and the grants and everything else through. And that had to be taken care of because we’re sitting here as a board saying, ‘What the dickens is going on?’” After Schultz took over, however, critics note that the agency’s revenue has declined. Less grant money is coming in, and they are offering fewer services. In 2012, the WRC raised $908,148 in government grants. In 2013, the year Schultz took over as interim director (in April), it raised $1,023,891. The amount declined to $821,258 in 2014, the most recent year for which a record of the agency’s IRS form 990 is available. Last year, ac-cording to a WRC financial statement, the agency raised $767,000 in grants.

Schultz said everyone in the domestic violence prevention community has been losing grant funding over the past several years.

“When I walked in the door, one of our major grant funders cut a whole position, and they did that arbitrarily across the board with every one of their constituents in the state of Michigan, and so everybody lost a position,” she sad. “We’ve seen a decrease in all of our state and federal funding, and it’s not just impacting our agency but all of our DV (domestic violence) partners in the state.”

Schultz said revenue is also down because the board decided to hand off Housing and Urban Development leasing assistance funds to Northwest Michigan Supportive Housing Services; they believed it made more sense for that agency to handle housing assistance.

“That was a significant portion of funding. That was about $83,000, so if you’re watching our grant revenues decrease, keep that in mind,” Schultz said.

A SCALED-BACK OPERATION

Schultz said that despite a perception that the agency’s staff has almost completely turned over in her tenure, attrition has actually been typical for a nonprofit.

Agency turnover has averaged 19 percent per year since she’s been in charge, she said.

Turnover among client advocates — the counsellors who work with women coming to the center seeking help — has risen under Schultz’s tenure: There was zero turnover in 2012, seven percent in 2013, 17 percent in 2014, and 20 percent last year, Schultz said.

The WRC’s average turnover rate is on par with other nonprofits, according to the 2015 survey of Nonprofit Employment Practices Survey Results.

“This is not what we would consider escalating turnover,” Schultz said. “It is very standard as compared to other nonprofits.”

Nevertheless, Schultz’s critics worry the increasing rate is a sign of trouble at the agency.

They point to another sign of scaled-back service at the WRC, which was established in 1975 as a regional organization that would serve Leelanau, Benzie, Grand Traverse, and Kalkaska coun-ties, and part of Antrim County.

Under Schultz, services offered outside of Traverse City have been reduced — from four days per week in Kalkaska and Benzie to one day per week, according to several people familiar with the his-tory of the agency.

Schultz said she wants to find a way to add staffing time in Kalkaska.

A women’s shelter in Benzie County closed two years ago, Schultz said, because problems with the building were deemed too expensive to fix.

Babb said women in trouble in Benzie County can come to Traverse City, where there is room available at the shelter.

“We definitely have a need for services [in Benzie County] — it was just the finances. Looking at the finances and what else is going on, it’s always a weighing,” Babb said.

HISTORICAL MEMORY LOST

Marjorie Rich was one of the employees who left after Schultz took over. Rich said she is alarmed at the high rate of turnover at the agency because that affects how well the WRC can pursue its mission.

“If you look at staff turnover, it has just about entirely turned over in the last three years for the internal staff,” Rich said. “It’s really concerning. There’s very little sort of historical memory. There’s very little continuity.”

Rich ran the doula program, which offers assistance to young mothers. Board members wanted to transfer the program to another agency because they didn’t believe it fell within the WRC’s mission. Rich left soon after the program transfer was announced last October.

“Why they wanted to get rid of it, I don’t know,” she said. Teenage girls who get pregnant are frequently victims of physical or sexual abuse, so Rich thought it fit well with the WRC’s mission — though she said she can understand how it also could fit elsewhere.

Soffredine said he doesn’t believe the doula program belongs at the WRC. He said they only took it on when no one else would. Schultz said they’ve received a Rotary grant to hire a consultant to plan for moving the program elsewhere.

“We were awarded the planning grant, so we can move forward now with a consultant, and we’re getting estimates from three different consultants to help us facilitate those discussions,” Schultz said.

District court Judge Thomas J. Phillips and Women’s Resource Center Executive Director Juliette Schultz at the nonprofits 40th anniversary celebration last year. Photo by Gary Howe.

Jessica Wheaton, who joined the board in 2013, agrees that the agency needs to sharpen its focus.

“It was really evident that we had our hands in a lot of buckets that weren’t 100 percent aligned with what the mission was,” Wheaton said.

For example, she said the nonprofit ran another program to help women do their laundry.

“That’s not domestic violence-related programing — [it was a] great program — and we were able to transition that off,” she said.

PARTNERSHIP WITH THE POLICE

In June, the WRC launched an expanded program to work with domestic violence victims alongside Traverse City Police officers.

The rollout of that, dubbed Advocacy Informed Response, hit some snags.

In the first month, whenever an officer would call for an advocate, no one answered the phone, and there was no voicemail set up, Chief Jeff O’Brien said. He said there also was some confusion about whether the WRC had agreed to send advocates to meet personally with victims.

Indeed, a WRC description of the program describes “in-person” crisis intervention, but Schultz said that was an error, and the agency intended to offer services to victims over the phone.

“The chief called me directly and said, ‘I want you to know that this is happening,’ and we’re actually in the process of resolving that,” Schultz said. “I can tell you that it’s a process that we need to improve immediately, and this is part of our goal of providing additional services to victims in our community.”

O’Brien said he hopes the program someday expands to include in-person responses, and he said he is confident that the problems will be worked out.

“I’ve talked to Juliette, and I feel confident that she’s going to remedy that,” O’Brien said. “I really want it to be successful. I think its really going to help domestic violence victims, especially indigent domestic-violence victims.”

WHAT’S BEST FOR THE CLIENTS?

Some former employees question whether the changes that have taken place really have been intended to better serve the WRC’s clients.

Kristin Rockwood, a Traverse City businesswoman and former WRC volunteer and employee, said she was stifled by the current management style at the agency. She didn’t think the leadership allowed staff to focus as much as they could on helping clients find employment.

“One area I found frustrating while volunteering and working for my short time, was the lack of clients connecting with community companies for employment opportunities,” Rockwood said.

Rockwood left WRC and started her own business, Press On Juice, in part as a way to empower women.

“After about six weeks [at the WRC], I realized that the management style of the Women Resource Center did not allow me to excel and contribute 100 percent,” she said. “I know that jobs are important to the success of women thriving. I decided I would build a business that would be a safe place for women to work.”

Shana Wojtowicz was a client advocate at WRC from 2011 through 2015 and saw the transition from one executive director to another.

Wojtowicz said she earned a masters degree through the University Center in counseling and wound up at the WRC as an intern.

She hadn’t planned on going into domestic violence counseling, but she found the field so rewarding that she stayed.

“I didn’t realize there were so many people in need of their basic needs being met and how much the agency was dealing with that,” she said. “Jo [Bullis] was just a magician in terms of working with other agencies and making sure that we had what we needed to deal with a client.”

She said the loss of Bullis left almost impossible shoes to fill.

She said the changes that took place under Schultz’s management caused some good employees to get fired and some to leave on their own. When client advocates left, she said, they were typically replaced with someone with far less experience.

Wojtowicz left for personal reasons, but she said she is worried about the number of people she knows who quit or were forced out after Schultz took over.

“When Jo left, it was a big hole, basically, that needed to be filled, and it kind of just felt like that hole kept hitting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Wojtowicz said.

AN IMPORTANT CULTURAL CHANGE

However the WRC is managed, almost everyone agrees its mission is critical for the community.

It’s easy to forget, O’Brien said, that not long ago, before there were agencies like WRC around the country, domestic abuse was much more rampant, and our culture almost accepted it. O’Brien recalls how bad it was when he started out as a reserve officer in the 1980s.

“I would go with the older officers to domestics, and the level of violence was just horrific — women with teeth missing and bloody noses and black eyes, and it was continually a revolving door,” O’Brien said.

Back then, the police didn’t consider it their problem, and they largely let it go, he said. Women’s resource centers were the agents of a cultural change across the country that shifted attitudes about domestic abuse.

“Because of the Women’s Resource Center, that whole philosophy has changed,” he said.

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