 Hello, my name is Lauren DuVeras, and I'm a member of the Future Forum Board. On behalf of the Future Forum, I want to thank you all for joining us today. And I also want to offer a quick thank you to our sponsors, the downtown Austin Lions and FVF Law. The Future Forum's events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors. The Future Forum brings together individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view to discuss local, statewide, national, and international topics that affect us today. Our goal is to create civil informed and bipartisan discussions. If you're not a member, I strongly encourage you to sign up before you leave. Members enjoy the best of what Future Forum has to offer, including first access to events and happy hours, networking opportunities, and benefits at the LBJ Presidential Library. Our next event will be a discussion on artificial intelligence called Seeking Truth in an AI World, Surviving Deep Fakes, Deception, and Discrimination. And we'll have that event next month. And on December 5th, we'll gather for a member holiday reception. Each year, the Future Forum hosts a discussion on women in leadership, a series which has explored a variety of topics including building diverse inclusive teams, women in government featuring a conversation with Madeleine Albright, the historic mobilization of women in politics, and the next generation of change makers. This year, the Future Forum is honoring domestic violence awareness month by focusing on the women leading this important work in Austin. Most of us has very constrained ideas about what intimate partner violence is and how we address it. We tend to think of family violence as an issue entirely separate from consumer protections, from public benefits, from immigration, and from data and privacy. But in fact, survivors of domestic violence often navigate many of these systems while trying to build safer futures. Last week, when our Texas Ledge debated immigration bills that were put forward during this third special session in a row, some of the most hard fought for and longest debated amendments attempted to consider these bills' impact on survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. The women on this panel tonight represent a multifaceted approach to addressing the issues affecting survivors of domestic violence, researchers, advocates, attorneys, and policy workers. I'm excited and honored to introduce you to our guest today. Bronwyn Blake is the Chief Legal Officer of the Texas Advocacy Project and the founder of their Teen Justice Initiative, a program that advocates for teen victims of dating violence. Krista Del Gallo is the Legislative Director of the Texas Council on Family Violence. Zara Shakur Jamal is the Director of Prevention, Outreach, and Community Education at Asian Family Support Services of Austin. And Dr. Leela Wood is a professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch School of Nursing and the Director of Evaluation at the Center for Violence Prevention at UTMB. And monitoring today's discussion is Leslie Schoenhell, Emmy-nominated morning news anchor for Good Day Austin. Please keep in mind that there will be time for questions at the end of the panel, and now I'll hand things over to Leslie. Thank you all. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for being here this evening. It is really an honor for me to moderate this panel because I, myself, am a survivor of childhood domestic violence. So thank you, first of all, to all the women who are here doing this important work. I'd like to jump straight into the conversation. We'll start with you, Dr. Wood. What really led you down the path of leading this important, very important work that you're doing? So my mother worked in a domestic violence program. She ran the childcare. She started working there when I was nine. I'm from a single-parent household. My big sister, who's one of my heroes is in the audience right there, came to support me. Yeah, so our mom worked. She ran the childcare and then later she worked with adult survivors. So I literally grew up in that shelter environment and around all of these incredible women who were doing all this leadership work in our community. And so when I was 14, I got to have my first official volunteer job. I did donations. I loved that. And then when I was 18, I finally got my first paid job and I was a prevention educator for many years. Later I got my BSW and then my MSW here, just down the road at the Steve Hicks School. And I ran our regional crisis line and did hospital accompaniment. I've had almost every job you can imagine. But my mom provided that anchor to me. And what she installed in me was that everyone is lovable and that survivors are so much more than their victimization. They are complex, beautiful, wonderful people with strengths. She's my inspiration for the work that I do and all the women I got to learn from in that particular setting. And it really led me to a lot of curiosity, which led me to transitioning my social work practice career into a research career. Yeah, thank you so much for that. And can you briefly share with us on the panel in the audience a little bit more about your current work and the data that you are looking into right now? Yeah, of course. I'm sorry, when I start talking about my mom, I get stuck there. It's beautiful. It's relevant. It's what's led you down this path. So thank you for sharing that. So I am a professor at UTMB and you're probably like, well, what are you doing here in Austin? So when they recruited me, I said, well, I'm going to have to stay living in Austin. But we have folks all over the state and what we work on is really a wide spectrum of research and evaluation that is community-oriented on dating violence and sexual violence prevention. And that's a spectrum of prevention from primary prevention, stopping it before it even happens, to really preventing it from happening again to somebody. And my work specifically focuses on the community-based response to domestic violence, particularly the over 90 programs across the state of Texas that provide free, comprehensive supports to survivors of violence. Yeah, beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. We'll move on to Krista. Tell us a little bit more about what led you to the work that you do. Well, I was a little bit anomalous in my family in terms of just from a really early age being very interested in service and social justice causes. And when I was thinking about my response to this answer, even though at first I thought it was really trivial because I learned about what was happening in Central America through Miami Vice in the 80s, and then talked to my teachers about it and stuff like that. And it made me think, though, that's so important because so many kids are plugging in in very different ways. And if you get that interest, if you find someone, bring them into the fold, welcome that and really nurture that curiosity and that want to make some change and to affect something good in the world. And I did a lot of volunteer work all through high school and I got to work at a Native American art museum in our city and that really put me down a path of studying more in terms of Indigenous people and their experience in our country. And then as soon as I got to Bloomington, Indiana, when I was 18 years old, I started working for Leela and Molly's mom at the Middle Way House in Bloomington, Indiana. And so I volunteered and worked there throughout college. I also was able to work at the first domestic violence shelter program that was built on Tribal lands, White Buffalo Calf Women's Shelter, which is incredible in Rosebud, South Dakota. And my last semester of college, I got to travel to Mexico and that was my first time being out of the country because my family only traveled for Notre Dame football games. So that was also a really big eye-opener and just to see there was just so much in this world and I really got back to Indiana and I just decided I really didn't like the weather or the food there. And so I came to Austin in 1998 and sort of through this Hoosier connection that's really beautiful, started working right at the Safe Alliance and so I've been on this track for quite a long time now. Yeah, thank you so much for that. It seems like an interesting journey there. Tell us a little bit more about your current work as legislative director. Well, I work at the Texas Council on Family Violence with several of the amazing audience members here. On the policy team, I transitioned to working for our statewide domestic violence coalition back in 2002, went straight from direct advocacy to working as what was then called a public policy specialist and I remember someone asking me at Safe Place, which was what the Safe Alliance was called back then. Oh my gosh, what are you going to be doing? It's a public policy specialist and I said, I do not know. But I am going to find out. And so 21 years later, I have a much better idea of it. I think that maybe the ignorance back in 2002 was definitely a little bit of bliss. But it's been amazing to work both in policy at a statewide domestic violence coalition because it's pretty non-traditional, so we absolutely do advocate within the Texas State Legislature and within Congress, but also have a really broad reach and attention and focus to all the different systems that impact survivors. And so that's been incredible and as Lila mentioned, we all have a very close connection to the family violence programs throughout the state and so it's exciting to do policy advocacy work that is so directly connected to the field and that's both because of our everyday conversations with program advocates but also because of the research that we're getting out of UTMB in the Center for Violence Prevention. So it's a pretty swell opportunity. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much. And we'll move on to Zahra. Can you tell us a little bit more about what led you to the work that you're doing at Asian Family Support Services of Austin? Yeah, absolutely. So everyone, my name is Zahra. I have been at AFSA for the last eight years, but AFSA has been serving Asian and immigrant survivors of violence in Central Texas for the last 31 years. I came to AFSA after what feels like a different life. I went to law school, was barred in California and did some legal aid work primarily with survivors of domestic violence both in the family law space but in other spaces. And I realized that so often that the folks that I was seeing were not always coming from communities that I know had a need for legal services. And there was such little funding, if any, for outreach to marginalized communities, for folks that didn't understand the legal and criminal justice remedies that were available in this country. So I found myself sort of thinking a lot on what it means to access justice and even the idea of justice and what it looks like in different communities. I also think a lot about, you know, the clients that did come forward, a lot of them had just some discomfort in accessing criminal justice systems and legal remedies that we were offering at Legal Aid. So we, you know, we worked a lot to sort of identify partners and for those of y'all that have been doing this work, it's really hard to come across community organizations that have connection with the folks that we wanted to reach, but also understood the context within which those families and communities were living and how to have conversations around domestic violence and sexual violence. In sort of my, sort of, you know, thinking on how do I connect folks with services that would make this legal interaction a little safer and accessible. I came across a lot of small nonprofits in the Bay Area. One was called the Asian Health Services. It was representing a client who was a Cambodian refugee, had been in the U.S. for decades, had spent most of her adult life working as a nurse and was seeing us both for a family law case involving domestic violence, but also a disability case. And for those of y'all that are familiar with disability cases, not super trauma informed, everybody that applies the first time gets rejected. And then we were supporting our appeal and I realized that this, and you know I was a baby attorney, didn't have any experience really working with clients in many ways it was a first for me as well and I realized when we found that she had an advocate at Asian Health Services that could be in community with her as we were asking her to share the details of violence that she'd experienced as a child, to share the details of violence that she had experienced in this decades long relationship that she was now exiting it made all the difference to have this person that she trusted that spoke the language that she spoke and her legal outcomes were much better because as a direct result of that. So when I was thinking about leaving the practice of law I was pretty sure that I wanted to be at an organization that could partner with legal aid and other partners but really thinking on how do we make services accessible and also what are the opportunities when criminal justice systems are not the way someone is seeking healing or justice, right? So I was really so that's kind of what's kept me in the movement, what brought me to the movement really thinking about what meaningful access looks like and how certainly beyond language access what are ways or what are the barriers that are keeping people outside of services so I'll pause there. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that and from what you shared is that a large part of what your role is currently at AFSA? It is. So AFSA is I do not serve clients directly a lot of the work that I do at AFSA is really engaging with communities and thinking on how do we disrupt cycles of violence in a meaningful way and that certainly looks like supporting our clients many of the clients that we serve at AFSA or I served at legal aid are often not this isn't their first abuse of relationship or the first interaction with violence so certainly tertiary or you know violence with folks that are or have experienced violence already but also thinking about how do we disrupt cycles of violence and have conversations in accessible both language and other and culturally grounded conversations with communities around healthy relationships and normalize conversations around consent and even mental health. Yeah, thank you so much. I do have some follow up questions on that but before we get to that I would like to also give Bronwyn a chance to tell us a little bit about the work that you do and what led you to where you are now. Thank you. I'm very lucky to work at the Texas Advocacy Project and always knew that I wanted to work there when I was an undergraduate student here at UT I was working at a daycare about a quarter mile from here the first English Lutheran church in daycare and I was studying plan 2 and one of the mothers asked me what I wanted to do when I graduated and I said well I'm going to go to UT law to be an advocate for women and she said do you know who I am or what I do I knew who she was and she said I'm the executive director of the women's advocacy project and I was like oh this is great so I started volunteering there before law school and I clerked there during law school and just connecting with her and everything about it really resonated with me because there is no other place like women's advocacy project which we now call Texas Advocacy Project to acknowledge that abuse happens to everyone and that word advocacy has always resonated with me we talk about it sometimes at our agency that it's hard to define and spell and people don't always understand what it means but it definitely meant a lot to me and I feel like the agency was pretty much designed to be a dream place for me to work I did interview at other places when I was in law school like you're supposed to do I'll never forget I interviewed with the American Bar Association's commission for domestic violence and they're a director at the time Robin Rung he was interviewing me and she said okay so you want to advocate for women yes domestic violence I said yes and she said okay what are you doing to help survivors at your law school and it had not occurred to me to have an answer to this question or that there were survivors at my law school and I've never forgot that moment where I bombed that interview and I will never forget that in any room you're in there are survivors around you everywhere you go there are survivors in this room and Leslie thank you for sharing that you're a survivor of domestic violence as a child so that really benefited me and I've been able to bring that to my work at Texas Advocacy Project and the work that we do there we serve the entire state of Texas essentially as a non-profit law firm and more we are in a way the law firm for the domestic violence shelters and family crisis centers around the state especially those that don't have lawyers on staff which is the vast majority of them we do have a network of legal aides you all know about legal aid we have the second largest legal aid in the country is here serving this area legal aid but they can only serve some people say as few as one fifth of the people that come to them or as many as one half so there's a huge justice gap there and we seek to fill that at least for survivors of interpersonal violence so it's so important to me that we never turn anyone away at Texas Advocacy Project so a lot of what I do now try to figure out how can we be really creative and be very efficient and make sure that we're providing the highest level of service we can to as many people as possible thank you so much for sharing that I think I want to just bring attention to what you said earlier you look around and there are many of us that are survivors some of us feel comfortable sharing that some of us don't and may never will how do we begin to really talk about intimate partner violence and what does it look like I think there are many PSAs out there that maybe make it look like it's only one thing Zara I'll ask you the question what can intimate partner violence look like what are the different iterations of it I feel like this audience might know there's a lot of TCFE folks in the audience but you know when we talk about IPV we make sure that in a lot of community settings we ask folks what domestic violence looks like or interpersonal violence looks like and folks go to the physical and that's an important part of the conversation but it's certainly not the only way folks can experience violence so as we talk about power dynamics in a relationship or one person exerting power to control another person in the relationship you know we have to think beyond beyond the physical and that certainly includes emotional violence and immigrant spaces we include using someone's immigration status against them as financial abuse in that relationship and we talk about sexual violence and how that shows up in relationships one of the early things I did we used to do refugee orientations down in Caritas and that program had has winded down since then and I talked about marital rape in that setting and we received a call on our hotline just someone saying that hey I didn't know that I had the right to consent if I'm in a long-term relationship with the same person that this idea of scope of consent and the ability to retract consent even in a long-term relationship so I think those are some of the things that I would certainly start with and I know there's other folks that can add would anybody like to add to what Sara said what are the top misconceptions or myths surrounding that perhaps that's going to go ahead and Krista I thought about that one and I thought about how to answer that in two minutes so I was like you got to really think about it Krista only say one of the things and I think one of the biggest myths or misconceptions is that there is some level of ease in leaving a violent situation in an abusive situation I know in doing trainings still to this day but early on one person said well there's free housing for DV victims and I was like where is this housing you speak of so this idea this misconception that for people that are fleeing that are poor for people that have legal needs that there is some sort of adequate level of resource and support available is completely untrue and this idea that I think also associated with myth of the ease of leaving is that it completely erases the fact that there is a substantial financial cost associated with leaving and so all of us that have ever moved understand that there is costs with any kind of relocation even if you do it with everybody that's in the household at the time but particularly if you go from two to one that's just real basic math like you've lost half of your financial resources and your support and most likely if you were in an abusive context that person is still actively trying to sabotage your ability to become economically stable and so I think that we do a huge disservice when we even don't speak up because it's not like somebody saying something that's like maybe even totally biased but when they make a comment or about like immigrants like having access to a bunch of public benefits and free stuff and it's like that's just simply not true and to continue to purport that and let those sort of myths go unchecked allows us to continue to be at the status quo and continue to diminish those supports that are so desperately needed for people that are trying to get safe and that need support like that there should be free housing for victims of domestic violence we would greatly reduce domestic violence and go far for prevention if we have that but the fact is it doesn't exist and so I think that the concept of the ease or it's like this no cost like just leave is one of the biggest myths. Yeah Bronwyn and Dr. Wood I'd like to hear a little bit more about individually in your fields what some of the common misconceptions are from the legal point also is looking at the dated research. Well I would love to build on the points that Zara and Krista made because when we understand that abuse isn't just physical and we understand that there's many reasons why somebody might not be able to leave an abusive relationship I'd like to correct the myth that leaving is the end leaving is the most dangerous time for a victim of domestic violence we have studies to prove your risk of being murdered greatly increase in the days, weeks and months after you seek help to get out of that relationship so it's not as easy as calling the police or going to a shelter or even filing for divorce there is a real risk attached to leaving and at Texas Advocacy Project that's one of the reasons that we feel so strongly that legal services need to be available a legal service like a protective order which sometimes other people call restraining order but in Texas a protective order is that stay away order that says somebody has hurt you has to stay away is the only remedy that's been shown to correlate with a decrease in interpersonal violence so those protective orders are just a piece of paper they're not 100% effective but they're the most effective thing we have so leaving is a very dangerous time for people and legal services can save lives so from a data perspective I think kind of underscoring psychological violence is the most common form of violence that happens but what I think is probably something that we don't talk about enough that kind of just feeds into a lot of what we've been talking about here is we don't talk enough about coercive control and I think a lot of people probably because they don't think about domestic violence all the time like I do probably don't think a lot about coercive control which is a unique type of psychological violence that's really about monitoring, surveilling threatening somebody it explains a lot of how violent relationships, harmful relationships happen how the dial gets turned up how that you know the frog in the water right it explains how somebody engages in this relationship that is a loving relationship that is an exciting relationship and how the relationship transforms and how it maintains kind of a level of threat and violence so again from a data perspective some of the most impactful things to health from a public health perspective are psychological violence and coercive control so I think part of the misconception I would like folks to address is really understanding coercive control and I think that also helps us understand why folks can't easily leave there's the economics coercion element of it but there's also a long side of that all of the psychological things that are happening for folks that are making it difficult for them to leave and when they do leave making it hard for them to gain and maintain any kind of safety so I think you know when you look at a prevalence study you'll see anywhere from 50 to 70% of survivors have experienced really intense physical violence but nearly 90 and sometimes 99% have experienced coercive control psychological abuse and economic abuse so I think really understanding the full spectrum of violence and really understanding coercive control is one of our challenges as folks out engaged in the community because coercive control tactics are what people talk about casually among friends they're the kinds of toxic things young people might mention they're the kinds of things that make people uncomfortable a friend might say they're the things that people might more easily share so if we learn to pick up on coercive control I think it helps us understand and communicate with our friends and loved ones about domestic violence yeah thank you for that Dr. Wood can you give some examples of what some of those things might be yeah checking on someone's text messages limiting their access to friends and family I often say you know connection is the antidote to abuse what somebody who's using power and control wants to do is keep somebody isolated connection remaining kind of in connection whether it's at work or with friends and family is the antidote to that so tactics that promote isolation keeping track of somebody where they're at monitoring their location I'm sure all of us could come up with a lot more I'm just I'm using some of the questions we use on our surface most often but really things that are meant to and also things that are meant to demean and threaten somebody put down's name calling and definitely controlling somebody's economic yeah I almost want to take us back to the basics but if someone wanted to add to that I can pause you know I think I think you mentioned it just a little while ago I think that one of the things that I confront a lot is that people think that if I'm highly educated of or of a certain socioeconomic status then I'm not a survivor and that makes it really difficult for folks that are experiencing violence to even name the violence that's happening to them or identify as a survivor so I do want to say that you know unfortunately some of the things that work in other settings as protective factors are not protective factors against domestic violence so again you know those everyday conversations that we're having it is important to normalize that violence can happen to any one of us and it does not speak to you know a survivor is me or anybody else in the space so I think normalizing that and I think a second piece of it is that while we serve male survivors gender-based violence does impact disproportionately women and folks that don't identify on the gender binary so also recognizing that a lot of communities that are facing violence and often are left with little recourse are folks transgender folks transgender people of color folks that are on the LGBTQIA plus so really just thinking about all the ways that people that access is difficult and how do you create space for those conversations right? Thank you so much for that and I'd like to expand a little bit more on that I think right now especially in 2023 and some of the legislation that you mentioned it has been an incredibly difficult time for communities of color for people who identify as immigrants who you know also like you said people in the LGBTQIA plus community can you share a little bit more on how each of your individual work really expands on each others and sort of this symbiotic relationship that's happening between all of you to help survivors go ahead so one thing I wanted to say is that while dating violence domestic violence can happen to anybody if you have multiple marginalized identity positions the impact of that violence is going to be more intensive your barriers to getting support are going to be more intensive and the your ability to access economic remedies is going to be more limited because of systemic oppression so while we say this can happen to everybody it disproportionately impacts people of color trans folks and that bears out in the homicide data when you look at who experiences IPV homicide in this country all of our COVID studies that Center for Violence Prevention Black women experience the most severe violence IPV intimate partner violence during COVID in all of our samples at CVP and had the highest lethality risk so I think that's just really important I'm a mixed methods researcher so I do survey data I do longitudinal studies, I do RCTs but I also do a lot of qualitative work and one thing I love about working with TCFV is they really honor and respect the narratives of the rich narratives that you get from that work so we've been working together for five or six years on a series of four different studies collecting data about survivors experiences across the state and some studies I've led and some studies I've just supported a lot of different data coming in but that whole pool of data recently translated into some policy change and what's nice about working with TCFV and actually we collected data both of your organizations for several of these projects what's nice about that there's limitations to what I know as a researcher I can analyze data and interpret it to the extent that in my positionality I understand it but when I go to a policy wonk and say oh here's the data all of a sudden it's transformed into potential legislation and I'm like how did that happen oh my gosh or I take it to Avsa and they're innovating so fast on their program and I'm like wait we haven't even evaluated it yet but they're already moving light years ahead TAP has virtual legal clinics you know because it came from needs assessment they work so fast so it's really great for me to have the opportunity to learn and to benefit from all the work they're doing but also to have help with what does it mean and what do we do next so I really get my ideas from them like I sure I have some okay ideas on my own but nothing is better than what comes from the field thank you so much yeah tell us a little bit more Kristen how your work is really impacting the other organizations as well yeah and I just to lift up a consistent theme that we've heard I think that a really huge myth and it comes up in policy and it is in part the domestic violence movements fall because of the narrative we've pushed is that domestic violence is a silo and it will be solved by solving issues for survivors of domestic violence that are neatly carved out and cut into this place whereas any bias any oppression any structural oppression that exists allows domestic violence to persist and makes it much more difficult and so I think that we are starting to see some of the unfortunate impacts of not making those connections fully with the general public and lawmakers because we wanted so bad to be simple people to be sympathetic to the issues of domestic violence survivors and we didn't want to make it messy or complicated and then you see something like House Bill 4 that's being heard in this special session it's already made it through the house it's going to be heard in a senate committee on Wednesday and it's news to folks that criminalizing entry without inspection or unlawful entry and giving peace officers which is a very broad term law enforcement that we think of but very broad spectrum of officials the entitlement and the authorization to arrest someone for a criminal offense for how they enter this country and or to take them to a port of entry to remove them and the fact that we have to make a connection that that will have a chilling impact on safety and help seeking behaviors on the part of victims of domestic violence and a whole host of other crimes and not just immigrants and it will only emboldened abusers and not just citizen abusers it will embolden an undocumented abuser that came over without inspection with their partner alike because they'll say oh you want to call the police you're going to get arrested and then me, the father of your children who has the job and pays for everything is going to go to jail and then get deported so think about that reality and so we've really disconnected sort of what supports violence prevention from the reality and now we're having to tell a very difficult story at a very bad time and just to be a little ominous because tis the season um and it's specifically with this session um we've come to a point particularly in our state legislature where data doesn't matter where facts don't matter not always but in many many spaces if you're appealing to us on a hot button issue um all of which are human issues um it does the science the facts the research does not matter um and that is an incredibly difficult situation that we haven't worked hard enough over the last 20 years like the other side has to not let that become what it is and just be the obvious like of course the Texas legislature is not going to do anything about guns even after revolting like how did we get here and so I just think that there's so much that in having survivor stories because even if you don't speak to the data if the data doesn't speak to you maybe a story that is relevant to you might or just basically an ivory tower of PhDs that say it might speak to you more than a survivor of domestic violence might speak to you as a policy maker um and certainly lawyers um have a level of clout and also I think that all like the legal services and just the knowledge of the law and to be able to also wield that as a weapon on our side is incredibly powerful so I think there's just so much that we all do together to help reshape narratives and to combat all of the myths and it's going to take all of us and all of you and all of everybody to start to push back on where we are right now because it's a very very dark space mine is racing because there's so much to share but I do think that I think that it takes all of us to be able to minimize harm I feel like with this last lead session there's an immense amount of stuff that you know that needs testimony and research and legal lawyers and so I think that it does take all of us to be able to have those conversations one less of a downer thing I'll share is that or maybe it is really depressing in itself is that we had the first Korean language testimony on the house floor with an interpreter present with TCF I think y'all were around for that one but also there's a statewide coalition of domestic violence survivors that is a survivor serving organizations that is Asian and immigrant facing and an organization out of Houston that's working on language access but you know that's really wonderful that 2023 was the year when we had a non-English testimony with an interpreter on the floor and that would not be possible without a lot of people that are in this room and that are here on the stage advocating for that on on the floor some of the other things that I think that we're really thankful to partner with Krista and her team and with the TCF and our other state coalition TASA which is the sexual violence survivor coalition is including sort of language accessibility in services across the board and advocating for that Vietnamese is the third most widely spoken language in Texas with Arabic following that and so but there aren't a lot of you know resources that are available in those languages we serve folks in 39 different languages last year and so continuing to talk about language access but also how do you get dollars allocated for that right when there's a small pool of dollars to begin with another thing that I think that we really rely on this this panel in the work that they do to highlight is disaggregated data data you know is important and with Asian communities a lot of times you know the Asian community is not a monolith but that's how we collect data on the Asian community and so there's not a lot of understanding on which you know I grew up in Pakistan and I did not think of myself as an Asian person until I came to the US so it's very much a political identity which makes a lot of sense for us to come together a lot of shared interests and need to advocate for each other and power in numbers but it does mean that you know for the South Asian or the East Asian folks that came with a level of education earlier in the cycle of migrations and have done well are skewing the data for everybody else right we see a large population of new immigrants of refugees that are in need of services but there's not a lot of we can't point to good data on that and so advocating for how agencies at the federal level and state level can continue to push for more specific because that is necessary as if I take it back to AAPI Asian American Pacific Islander communities it completely glosses over the challenges that those communities are facing I say language access is a big problem for Asian American communities that is not a problem for Pacific Islanders but preservation of culture and language in homes is really important and is leading to risk factors that they're facing so a lot of the work we do would be anecdotal without researchers helping us gather that data, analyze that data understand that this means something and can get us somewhere and of course TAP and AFSA are often co-advocates on cases many we a lot of our clients of course seek legal services and so being able to refer to legal aid but also have an organization that can serve folks that are in need of those services is really really important and valuable and keeps our communities safer. Would you like to add a little bit more about? Certainly the way that our organizations are connected is innumerable there are so many times where I'm reaching out to the women up here and the groups up here I'll say that as a legal service provider it is imperative for us to acknowledge that our clients have higher level needs. Someone's not going to be able to partner with me in work to get that protective order or get that divorce if they don't have housing or if they don't have food so it would be ignorant for me to just think legal services also might need. So we're always partnering with advocates at AFSA and at the agencies that belong to TCFE to make sure that the survivors that we work with are wrapped in services in the same way we like to partner with culturally specific groups like AFSA to educate our attorneys and make sure that our clients have the support and the sensitivity that they need but we also know that most survivors in violence may never access services from a shelter so that's one of the ways that we're also trying to be creative and find survivors where they are. So one thing that we consulted with Dr. Wood on recently is making sure that we're collecting the right kind of data to show the impact of our services to funders. This is some way by funding research so you understand just for example the impact of stress on people's health. We're not able to collect from all our clients what kind of stress you're experiencing before our services and what kind of stress you're experiencing after our services. This is really over simplifying it but I could show our legal services was a reduction in stress. Then I can plug into all this data is this is how you taught us right Dr. Wood I think I've got it right. I can show hey if you fund our legal services then you also are helping people prevent all these other health effects. Using data like that can help us be more appealing to a broader array of funders so our agency is not going to be constantly dependent on state grants and federal grants that are very limiting and restrictive. If you get a grant from the state of Texas right now it's going to say a lot about immigration. It's going to say you cannot provide services to people who are undocumented. It's going to put out an income restriction on those services that you can provide. Only the poorest of the poor are deserving of your free legal services. Well with intimate partner violence you've learned it can happen to anybody absolutely anybody. All the abuser needs is some kind of vulnerability and let's say there is a lot of assets in a relationship but maybe because of the abuse or the course of control the survivor doesn't have access to the bank account or the credit card we want them to still be able to come to tap so we have to go look for outside funding. We can't be grant restricted so data helps us do that. Thank you so much for sharing that. We are coming up on time and I would like to give the audience a chance to ask some questions but before we get to that one big takeaway is again really putting into perspective this political climate that we are in in 2023. You said earlier oppression makes domestic violence and interpersonal violence more persistent I think there are a lot of oppressive laws that are currently going through not only Texas but really around the country help is getting politicized you know the idea that maybe helping immigrants or undocumented folks and it's leading to really dangerous impacts with that landscape in mind how can people help how can we support you how can we support your work can we support survivors who are who need you Just to piggyback on what Bronwyn was just talking about I think that there is a huge need for resources without strings both for the groups that are serving and advocating on behalf of survivors because governmental grants do not allow you to advocate at the legislature we have to use like our 3% of unrestricted dollars to fund all of our advocacy at the legislature so simply not just donating to our organizations and say you know which would be great and becoming a member of TCFA would be great but also helping us because people that are in the business community I'm like the dumbest person in America on making money from corporations sometimes there's probably corporations out there in groups that would just throw money at us, unrestricted and some groups have like figured this out but we have it because we're busy like trying to like stop the Texas legislature from doing something terrible so like any expertise in that is to like help us to grow as organizations like TAP was saying like so that we can get in more of those dollars that free us up to do the work that survivors really need and I think that I'm going to just softball or to Dr. Wood and I think that the same goes for survivors when all of the type of help and assistance is coming through some flow of governmental grant then it is restricted to maybe who you're serving but also how you can serve those people and so we know that survivors and free from which is an organization out of LA that did a national survey of survivors about how much would it take for you to get safe in a month and they all said around that the average was about $750 which is extremely affordable it's way more affordable than a shelter for a month or than a prison and so but it is almost impossible to be able to just give a survivor of domestic violence $750 to go do what they need to do with it to be safe and feel stable that day and so that also is something that's a huge need. Anyone else like to share what are some ways that we can support you? Well we got a grant last week from the office on violence against women to study the use of flexible funding in Harris County because they did get some unrestricted money to do that so stay tuned for more information on that in about two years there's so I think that there's doom and gloom but there's also one thing I really as a researcher there's so much innovation happening at the local program level and there's amazing things happening at the federal level as well I mean the fact that I was able to get this study funded from office on violence against women is pretty incredible but I think there's this idea of partnerships so technology offers us so much in terms of being able to reach survivors and Bronwyn made this incredible point about most people don't come to services right so things like a tiktok reel provides a lot of education to young people about violence so really if we can get in partnership so even if folks don't want to give us money if they want to give us some time if we can get in partnership particularly with tech and with I mean you know Mike Mackert's group down the road that does amazing health comms work really finding some of our messages you know talking about getting prevention and some of our dialogue about dating violence into the virtual realm in a way that is accurate in a way that is supportive in a way that is survivor centered that means partnering with tech it means partnering with people who know how to do advertising on social media stuff I do not know how to do and if I ever get on tiktok I think my teenager will die but really using a lot of partnerships to take our practice knowledge our policy our research findings and disseminate them into untraditional sources we don't get to do prevention in the schools as much as we want to anymore but we can do it online we can do it through social media we can do it through digital hotline like safe alliance has so there's a lot of opportunities for partnership that will help us reach survivors and importantly reach survivors who aren't going to come traditional dating violence services I would like to ask everybody here to just continue working to end the stigma around domestic violence I know that you know sometimes if you feel like someone close to you is experiencing that it's really tempting to say oh that's a private issue that's very personal I'm going to let them take care of it but isolation as you've learned is what feeds intimate partner violence it really can happen to anyone so letting people know that you care about them you're scared for them you're here to help when they're ready can really go a long way so if it's something that you're here tonight that we can talk about more that people shouldn't be ashamed of because a lot of survivors will tell you they feel deeply ashamed and that's part of the abuse is to make them blame themselves for their emotional abuse so letting them know this isn't your fault this can happen to anyone I care about you I'm scared for you I'm here to help you when you're ready can be really powerful and then also please vote there's a case in front of the Supreme Court in a week US v. Boheme where our justices are going to determine if we're going to continue federal mandate that people who've been found to be abusive shouldn't have firearms this law saves lives and it is not the law here in Texas anymore because we live in the 5th circuit where there are more conservative judges than any other circuit in the United States because there were more judges appointed in the last administration than any other circuit in the United States so that election impacted us here in Texas we don't have the same rights as the rest of the states right now abusers can have guns in our state and so we're about to find out in a week we're going to find out everywhere I'm very hopeful about it but please vote I mean we definitely need the unrestricted dollars but I won't belabor that point I will say that I think have conversations right I think that we've talked about being in community as being a protective factor maybe one of the only ones that we can point to and people don't want to call a haul line and talk about their relationship right next to them in their workplaces people in congregational spaces wherever people gather so I think having conversations is you know we talk about prevention work and it gets so technical because so many of our grants don't want to fund prevention so out of an 11% outreach team I have two half people that can do prevention work but we really need all of us to do prevention work and prevention really just looks like normalizing conversations around violence and what Chris has said earlier about you know when there are additional risk factors violence is harder to escape and so we saw a rise of Asian hate during the pandemic but that wasn't the first time that folks have experienced xenophobia in America there's a rise in Islamophobia, anti-Semitism these are all things that are related to how people experience violence and how communities heal from trauma and so calling out when you're a witness to it is really important and I know it's really uncomfortable but I think that you know really normalizing conversations and a lot of times people you know language is gendered and language is violent and I think that we have to unlearn some of those things and so really there is no way that of only the professionals that have the opportunity and we're really honored to be doing this work but we need the community to have those conversations and so I say initiate a conversation with someone Thank you so much to all of you and I'd like to open up the space now if anybody has any questions that they would like to ask of our panelists I believe there's Mike from there Hi, my name is Brianna I just want to say thank you so much for your work I imagine it can probably be quite scary so thank you on the prevention to you guys noodle on like root cause with the abuser and is it like too controversial to wonder if there were services for them and so it's for both sides and that is there like a before and after so they're not just carrying that title and the survivor gets out and then it just keeps going so I think the noodling point yeah so I think our task especially in the research community I'm part of is really to focus on on research focused on not only violence primary prevention so stopping it from ever happening the first place but working with harm doers working with folks that have experience that are using violence and harm on innovative and new strategies so as a research community we have not spent as much time working on things like batters intervention and prevention as we should have really the most exciting work in prevention of violence and harm is happening on the primary prevention front and the secondary prevention front with use but I want to underscore something that Krista touched on earlier that when we talk about root causes of violence and we talk about violence prevention some of the most impactful violence prevention strategies are economic and policy and nature so housing childcare these are really important violence prevention strategies and their perpetration prevention strategies because of the way that that generational cycles of violence and harm and oppression permeate in communities these economic remedies are really important I will say though we have very many exciting primary prevention tools that prevent perpetration and prevent re-perpetration for young folks the fourth R which we study at center for violence prevention at safe dates and there's several of them and many of them have been culturally adapted and are available to use we just need the political will to get them implemented I do think where the evidence is a little fuzzier is what to do with adults who are using violence and harm some of the criminal justice remedies don't work as well as we'd like them to though some of them work for some folks especially folks who have something to lose from being arrested or violating their protective order but it's really the task I think a lot of us researchers have called each other to task for not focusing enough on this and it is really the work it will be the work of the decade ahead of what to do about this because we just don't know enough about how to stop it once it started particularly for adults thank you we have a question thank you Hi my name is Temmie I'm a licensed master social worker in the state of New York and Texas I was just wondering what you do to combat burnout you know it's a very difficult topic and it's hard to be in the helping profession especially at this time but I would think of things like community and support for each other to help you through this but what have you done to combat burnout within this field well as maybe the most burned out person on the stage but it's not a burnout olympics up here now just right now but I will say that one thing that AFSA's leader Darlene Lanham said at something she was speaking at in front of a lot of TCFE staff was how they're really working on incorporating pleasure into their prevention work and that's something that I think sometimes people think if I have a smile on my face or if I laugh or make a joke about some TV show and then go back to talking about the statistics on domestic violence and everything what a horrible person we have to be able to interject our whole selves and our whole and the good that really is even just in a one of the most important things for working well with people that do harm is recognizing that most people that do harm do something really well and if we celebrated that a little bit more maybe I just think that we need to sort of celebrate and enjoy and get together in community and be okay with having fun and being creative and finding outlets for pleasure and not letting sort of this idea that we should feel really guilty about that or that it's not appropriate because of the issue that we're talking about I think it's absolutely necessary I think at the times that we are now if we only focus on exactly what is going on like none of us should even have been able to get out of bed today and so we have to find those things that like we can just celebrate as like this is what is really golden in humanity and allow that for ourselves and each other I would just yes absolutely joy is radical in ways that you never thought the other thing I would say is that you know and we were kind of giggling up here because it's something that you know we were faced in a really sort of real way during the pandemic but also is constantly something that we should be prioritizing as organizations as individuals as folks that are supporting people in community that are excited to do this work or for survivors I think one thing that we've heard from our staff also is a living wage it is not you know people are not doing this work because they you know it's easy right and we live in Austin and the cost of living in the last eight years that I've been here has you know has skyrocketed right and so we've worked a lot to in addition to making sure that there's opportunities for folks to come together in community and support that people don't need side gigs to live in Austin right and I don't know that we're there you know fully but we have prioritized living wage raises not you know dependent on performance living wage wages across the agency and we hope to be able to fund that every year and continue to raise because the cost of living is going up but also recognizing that people have school tuition and rents and cars because our public transport system is not what it should be so that's something that we're also thinking about how do we make it sustainable for somebody great question hi I'm Terry Langford I'm the Health and Human Services Senator at Texas Tribune you had mentioned that the state has and I think all of you chimed in on this the state has strict parameters on who you can help has that been something that has gotten worse over time or something that's always been and can you talk a little bit more about that yes thank you for that question you know in almost anytime that we receive a grant or other people receive a grant there are going to be restrictions on how you use that money and my colleagues pointed out that one big restriction might be that you need to use this money for direct services so even that you might think well that's pretty innocuous that's not saying there's an immigration restriction or an income restriction although many of our grants certainly have those but saying okay that has to be on direct services well what that can do to a coupling because it might mean that we can't use any of our money for outreach or development or policy work which is also very important so our agency has been very fortunate and we really appreciate our government funding but we combine it with other sources of funding so we've become very strong and stable by using a braided funding system and making sure that we're reaching our government funders private foundations as well as private individuals and all of those funds are earmarked in different ways and have different strengths I haven't noticed a change in how our government grant restrictions play out there are some that have come up recently for example we did have funding from the state of Texas now that says okay you cannot diversity is definitely coming up and you've seen this here at the University of Texas some of our funding has said okay you cannot be using this funding for any kind of DEI training and things like that so there's some wins in Texas sometimes that blow and they say okay you have to be very careful about how you're using your money or what you're even saying about the use of it so all of our state agencies and people funded by state agencies might experience that okay we probably have time for one more question yes I don't know whether the 88th legislative session will ever be over but assuming that it is over and we get to the 89th session it seems that the abortion ban bill looks like it has some room to reduce some restrictions and I'm wondering whether you all would wager on whether folks who suffer from domestic violence and rape and incest then become pregnant and want an abortion whether that will change in the state of Texas we've had conversations in advance of the 88th because you know abortion became legal in Texas prior to January of 2023 because of our trigger law and it's a really delicate conversation because I think something I mentioned earlier is you know the way we prevent domestic violence is not by just continuing to say well this if we could let protect victims of domestic violence or let victims of domestic violence get this which is so incredibly important like no one would fault us for supporting abortion access for domestic violence victims, sexual assault victims and incest victims and we started to have some of those conversations and then what came up was like well just what kind of proof would people have to show and it just goes back into all of these things where it's like real victims and people that access a legal system and so it's just I feel like it's a slippery slope particularly in that because the abortion ban obviously affects all of us and particularly more so people with uteruses that have significantly less rights here in Texas not just because we can't get an abortion but also because once you become pregnant your civil rights really diminish and so I think that that I think where we need to stand with that and we need all of everyone to stand with us on is just a united front that this is not how this is not a law that we want here like this is ludicrous the majority of Texans don't agree with it but how do we get to a place where the majority of the populace's opinion actually influences the policy maker's opinions and so I think that that's as a policy person is a challenge and looking into the 89th session which I do tout myself on some psychic abilities but unfortunately I don't think it looks like super shiny looking into 2025 but yeah I just think that's really tricky and I think that that's something that we've all internally talked about like do we want to try to say that like these types of people can maybe enjoy an abortion as opposed to somebody else that doesn't have that right like while the right is still precluded from everybody else I think that it's just a tricky conversation but we should continue to have it it's less than 50% of the voting public would register to vote vote your idea that getting people to vote is really, really important good job friend well thank you so much for your time thank you so much for your time as well our panelists will be around for a few more moments if there are still some questions that you would like to ask them Zara, Krista, Dr. Wood thank you so much for the work that you were doing, the work you continue to do and thank you so much for sharing a little bit more on really expanding this conversation this very important conversation thank you