 When people have something horrible happen to them, eventually it is a spiritual struggle. Many people have no qualms whatsoever to come to see me at any time. That's what I'm here for. We, as religious people, were wondering, you know, how in the world can we cooperate with all of these other entities, you know, and, you know, where do we fit? Everyone is a service provider, be it clergy, be it someone working in the field of domestic violence. The value of linking the faith community with the victim assistance community is that all are needed to serve the individual. We both speak the language of compassion. Fragmentation does not work with victimization and healing. Unity works, holistic works, and coming together to help the person come together works. In 1982, the President's Task Force came out with its report on crime victims. Studies have shown that clergy were one of the first places that victims started to go to in the natural course of seeking counseling or moral support. And clergy were almost forced to begin to learn more about crime victim issues. I got involved as a police chaplain with the Sanford County Sheriff's Department, the Sanford Police Department, because of the trauma that these officers were going through. This was that shooting that happened out there off of Rufina Street, and, you know, I was the second officer there. I was back up to David, and I just was kind of overwhelmed with the whole thing. Ministers began being asked by police departments to assist in counseling of police officers. I saw a lot of law enforcement officers that were in pain that didn't know how to process. I was right there to help them. Of course, when events happen in different communities, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, clergy are often pulled into that to assist in the response. So I made my way back down to the temporary morgue, and when I walked in, our officers, our detectives who were working that scene were, you could tell, were traumatized. How do you deal with the human spirit that's been crushed by what it's seen, what it's smelled, what it's heard? Craces and traumatic issues are things that strip us at our very core values because we just never thought it would happen to us. So a specific trained chaplain working alongside of law enforcement and helping our community is the ideal person to be that first responder. The Clergy Response Institute was established in Oklahoma City to help train clergy for any kind of community response that they may face, and also to receive training on criminal victimization and violence. Our chaplaincy has great partnerships within our community, with community-based organizations. So who do you have going with you? Well, Frank's giving me some direction. He's going to give me further direction here in a little bit. We're going to contact the counselors and psychologists at the school in order to make sure that they have a heads up as to why the boys are absent. What district is this? It's going to be San Juan Unified School District. We have over 70 chaplains that respond alongside of officers to victims in homicides, suicides, fatal accidents, child deaths. If they're standing in the rain because of a fatal accident, it could be just to hold a umbrella for them. Get them a cup of coffee. Here I have a beautiful crucifix, and people see, oh, this guy's Roman Catholic. I would say to them at the scene, it doesn't matter what I am. What matters is that I'm here. I'm here for you. I'm not here to preach to you about my religion, or impose to you on my religion. The fact is that I'm here for you. What can I do for you? Sidron Institute is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to educate all the different professionals and individuals who work with victims, and their expertise is on trauma. The challenge was to explore ways to bring the faith community and the secular service providers who work with victims together to form a cohesive network. We were hired to develop this project, bringing Elaine's gifts as a service provider, and mine is clergy. The more traditional service providers actually will say to you, I cannot meet the spiritual needs of many of the people who come to me for help. So I know that there's parts of the healing that I cannot address. However, I'm not very comfortable in working with people of the faith community with clergy because they don't understand how we provide services and we don't understand them. The justice system is beautiful in this country, but it's also complicated. What I see is the greatest challenge is trust between the two professions. Probably the most important way to build relationships is one-on-one contact. Also, joint training sessions where you know that individuals have been exposed to the same sort of material and learning that you have. I have to be honest enough to say to myself, I've taken this person as far as I can go. Now I need to give this person to somebody else, but I need that person that I can trust to refer to that person. Today, I feel like they have invited us in, they pulled us in and looked at us as a viable option for services to people. You know, we can reach people where they can't, they can reach people where we can't. The church provides something tangible, although you can't put your hands on it. It's tangible and it manifests itself in how a victim behaves and goes about following the rest of the links of the chain. The person who's the service provider in the clinic only knows what the client presents them with. If I walk around the corner to go get a couple of kids for choir practice, I see them where they play, I see their house, I've chatted with the adult that they live with, so I think there's an opportunity for exchange of information and support. We always talk about collaboration. Collaboration is very important and it's got to be modeled between the two of us. And I can tell you, that's when people see us. They say, wow, the two of you, you know. We have different methods sometimes, different ways of approaching people, but the one thing that we in our heart and soul believe in and the reason we're doing this work is because the core of it all is to respect the victim, to respect their needs. So we always say, remember the double Rs. Respect and relationships. The Castle Reservation is located next to the city of Usk in northeast Washington, about 40 miles south of the Canadian border. We experience, like any other city or population, a diverse array of crimes. We have a high population of the individuals that we work with that are experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault. Those are probably our highest. The first dream that was going to meet those needs was the Kamas Institute. It would provide, you know, the health and wellness services and any other services basically that would meet the tribal needs for the elders, the children and all that. With Kamas Institute, the essence of the person is defined in four ways, which make up the spirit, which is the emotional, the psychological, the physical and the spiritual. And this embodies the whole person. We just praise you as we pray for the Four Directions, Father. We just thank you for each and all things, Father, that is of living creation in your beautiful name, Ahoh. We call it Maudelaise Arles, which means medicine wheel in our language. And so we address recovery issues in that way, whether it's with victims of domestic violence, victims of crime, alcohol and drug abuse. It doesn't matter. We address all the issues. I can recall in my early practice that it was a no-no to talk about spirituality with our clients. And we do need to address it. And it needs to be what the person wants it to be. Victims of crime have been damaged in the way that they look at themselves. And it's very, very hard for them to see anything good in their lives. We want to show them all their strengths and get them to start believing in themselves again. And we do it through our tribal traditions. Our sweat house, our winter dancers, our morning smudging process with the sweet grass. When we light it and the smoke comes up, all that time we're making our prayers and cleansing, letting it go with the wind, making it go with the smoke as it reaches up. Native American tribes approach spirituality in different ways. Each tribe has its own sense of spiritual practice. Spiritual practices vary depending on region, location, time of the year. Sometimes if we find somebody faltering, I try to step back and bring them up with me so that we all walk together. If there's something I can't handle, I say, well, go see Good Joe Wainer's group or refer him to Ricky or somebody. We have a talking circle for men and women. Then we have what we call our light bison recovery support groups. We have men's, women's, children's, family. I'm a survivor of domestic violence, so that means my children learned it, so they need to talk about it. I think my age group is saying, no, we need to talk about these domestic violence secrets and heal from them. Even though I was a professional woman, educated Indian woman at that time, that domestic violence, if it hadn't been for our tribal traditions, I could never have broken it. Ten years from now, I see our tribe a little stronger than we are today because we are beginning to become aware of the importance of our traditions, the importance of our culture. We also share our gifts with non-native Americans because it works for anyone who believes. So we're trying to make the community the treatment center. It's like a center without walls. The idea of drawing together the daughters of Abraham came with 9-11. I was very compelled to do something but could not figure out what that something was. Until that happened, I didn't realize that people really don't know anything about us and all of a sudden they're looking at us like we are the enemy. For a while my housekeeper, she wouldn't let me leave the house because I wear a scarf and she was nervous she thought somebody would attack me. I thought if we could bring together Jewish, Christian and Muslim women, we could interact and teach each other. The daughters of Abraham derive the name from the biblical patriarch Abraham. All three of our religions trace our roots to Abraham and look at him as a spiritual father. The daughters of Abraham meet once a month and each meeting is rotated from church to synagogue to mosque. When we meet in a mosque, we respect their holy space by covering ourselves with a scarf or a hat. At each meeting there is a discussion topic and it's announced the meeting before. Some things flow from our meetings. Some of us have backgrounds in non-violence. I was a rape crisis counselor for five years here in Fort Worth and I brought that experience with me. Family violence isn't supposed to happen but it does happen and it does happen in families where they're supposed to be religious and it happens behind closed doors. In any faith community, there are women who are known throughout the faith community through their volunteer work, for example with rape crisis centers and battered women shelters and child abuse programs and so forth. I'm happy we have this group and maybe we need to educate more people that we have a support group that we are willing to help work with them. People in my area know me and they trust me. So if I have had people come to me and talk about being abused, women, and I have guided them where to go because not being in that work myself, I cannot solve their problem but I can help. We have to know how to help them. Sometimes we can help them by just listening to them and then advising them where to go for help. We developed a public awareness campaign that was funded by OVC, working with the newspaper here and other media outlets. We developed a poster that we distributed that listed the victim assistance organizations throughout Tarrant County as a place where women of any faith could go and get help. The value of linking the faith community with the victim assistance community with the psychiatric community with the medical community is that all are needed to serve the individual. I want every community to have a daughters of Abraham group where they can reach out to each other and get to know each other, to get to understand their faiths and be ready to help each other. Brittany, I just need to do a neurologic exam. I have been part of the faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina for now 12 years. But it's real easy, you'll do fine. I was fortunate to be involved with Church of the Holy Cross so that made me also think about what our church is doing, what our synagogue is doing, what our faith community is doing to help victims of child abuse and neglect. So at our child abuse conference, we had a speaker there and she told me about a program that she had heard of in another community where they had really paired up case workers with congregations. And I started thinking, we live in the city of churches. We can do that here. Eve sent a letter to many of the churches asking us to come to a meeting to form this organization to assist citizens in our community. She was hoping to get a conglomerate of different faiths and bringing them together to work within the community. Eve is a religious person and attends church regularly. And I'm Jewish and I also attend synagogue regularly and it sort of just felt like the right place to start reaching out to people. As a case worker in the 70s, we were always taught separation of church and state. And now, with Halas especially, we're bringing the faith community right into our case work, which is very different. It's very different, but absolutely effective. When I was a case worker with the Department of Social Services about 30 years ago, we had a list of providers in the community to call when we needed help for a client. I can remember calling up to 10 resources before I could get one to say, yes, I'll try to meet that need. So Halas has reduced the number of calls to one call. Our case worker today can make a call to their partner with Halas and make a request and receive what they need for their family. Whether it's back-to-school, back-to-school drive for supplies, book bags, uniforms, the angel tree at Christmas time, enrichment programs where there's a child who has a special gift that may need maybe piano lessons or they want to learn to dance. I might run an article in our newsletter at Grace Church asking someone to help assist a child to go to summer camp. It helps a child's self-esteem and it also helps the family because the family then can concentrate on something else other than say, well, my child now has essentials for school. Now I can devote my time to seeing that other areas of the family are stabilized. I have a couple of really nice thank-you notes. He goes, dear Halas, I thank you for sending me to camp. I like it very much. I had a lot of fun and he drew a picture of himself in the pool. I think that one of the real pleasures about watching Halas grow and it started out really sort of as my baby but it's an absolutely collectively-owned baby now. Charleston County DSS is the envy of some of my peers in the state because they often ask, how do you get done what you get done? And some have expressed interest in organizations such as Halas and their communities. It's really a tremendous benefit not only to the case workers but to the families we serve. The faith-based community has long been dedicated to helping those who are exploited. I'm a victim of trafficking and I wish this thing didn't happen to me. Human trafficking is any kind of recruitment, harboring, transporting, obtaining a person for the purposes of commercial sex or forced labor. As we all know, slavery has been outlawed for a very long time but in fact this is modern-day slavery. I came here when I was 17 years old and I came here with a family from my country as a babysitter. When I got to this country things were nice but after a few months things changed. People are tricked or forced or abducted or threatened into situations which against their will. Many times victims of human trafficking come from countries where religion is extremely important to them. So it has not been uncommon for a church to be the only point of contact for the victim of trafficking. I couldn't go nowhere. I couldn't have friends. I couldn't go to school. Trafficking victims often are, you know, observed and constrained. One opportunity for them to leave their trafficking location is that they are allowed, some are allowed to go to church. And so that may be the one small window of opportunity to engage with that victim and begin the identification and the rescue process. Before when I was there in Peru, she told me that, you know, you have your friend there so you could go out and everything, you go to school and all that. But, you know, after that once I got to this country it was totally different. I ended up working many, many hours per day, per week, under threat of deportation or harm to his family, his mother and sisters in Peru. I think it was five in the morning, four in the morning. Immigration officers came downstairs and they went to another room. When I heard them, I just tried to run away. So what can I do? I just tried to run away. But they called me when I was outside. Once the investigation gave enough information to the ICE agents that they were possible victims of human trafficking, they were brought back and were placed in a hotel. However, the victims were not willing to come forward with a lot of information. They were absolutely terrified to speak. This is the most vulnerable time for a victim because they have just come out of a slavery situation. They need the most intensive services. A couple of people from my office, including me and Safe Horizons, we went to the hotel. Once I identified that we were from the Catholic Church, that's when people started talking to us. They told me that they're going to help me. All they have to do is just tell the truth and that's what I did. They were really nice, they were really nice to me. Many faith-based organizations and this is certainly true of ours have the networks to do effective work and so that makes us unnatural in terms of doing the services. By working with refugees and providing pre-settlement services, we know whom to go to, we know that people need housing, we know that people need to eat and how to organize large groups to provide these kind of services. We have many partners in the community that add pieces to our program that we don't do and I think it enriches our services because it's a difference in agency and personnel and maybe philosophy. Faith-based organizations are part of this broad network. That's why it's been encouraging to see nongovernmental agencies and government agencies really come together in a victim-concerned way, victim-centered approaches to work as a team to address all of those needs. Other crime victims don't get anybody to talk with them or to help them when they get in trouble. I mean, if the police come, writes it up and most of the time, that's just it. Good Samaritan's program is a crime victim assistance program that brings community volunteers into service of crime victims, particularly senior citizens, women living alone, disabled people, people who have no resources to recover after a crime, especially with property crimes because property crimes are the ones that are solved the least and they are the most frequent crimes that are committed. We think then that our Good Samaritan's project could alert community volunteers to this problem that night. Maybe if necessary, come fix the door or the window that night or come stay there till dawn or till another family member can come. The Good Samaritan's program has been growing for the past year into some new communities. Pritchett is a city that has been stricken by poverty and crime. Our church is right in the center of a poverty-stricken area and we do a lot of ministry work. The Good Samaritan's program, the major attraction to me was that we get community, faith-based community to be a part of looking out for those that have been victimized. We work with volunteers throughout the community but we recruit the volunteers by going into churches. John Jones, Trinity Lutheran. Many do bury First Baptist Pritchett. We train the volunteers by bringing them into a four-hour training session because they need to be compassionate and understand what crime victims experience. How many of you have been a victim of crime? Just show of hands. A lot of our victims need someone just to listen and it's important to be able to have the communication skills and the listening skills to help those who have been a victim of crime. Do you think schools should have sex education as part of their curriculum? We also have a lot of exercises that we use to see what your values are. Sometimes it's hard. We think we know what our values are and sometimes things change. And with this exercise they're able to see that these are my values but I can't force those things on others. Hey, how are you doing? I'm fine. How are you doing? Callie Sanders. Good to meet you Miss Sanders. Miss Sanders? So we do some victim service specific training and then we also do some training on how to fix a lot or how to board up a window. We train against American volunteers and everything to do dead bolts, install doors, windows, fences, things of that nature. Whatever the job needs, you know, that's what we train them for. It takes all of us working together to utilize our resources to make sure that the victim is taken care of. If we leave the piece of the community up to cops and prosecutors, we're going to lose. There's too much work to be done. And we have to have, among other things, faith-based institutions leading the way.