GoWomen: CFW’s Long-Time Commitment to Ending Violence Against Women

CFW’S LONG-TIME COMMITMENT TO ENDING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

October is domestic violence awareness month. My own experience working in a battered women’s shelter from 1981-1985, first as a volunteer, then counselor and volunteer, was one of the reasons Lucia Woods Lindley hired me to help start The Sophia Fund in 1983, a precursor to the Chicago Foundation for Women in 1984.

Learning from the women in the shelter made us begin to understand “intersectionality” in real time before the term was coined by Professor Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. It is defined as “the complex, cumulative ways in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”

Women who were survivors of domestic abuse came to the shelter because they had nowhere else to go. They came from all economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. The shelter offered counseling and resources, but as important as these services were and are, they offer only temporary housing and food, temporary safety, and temporary child carechildcare. We learned why women often returned to their abusers who would frequently promise to atone, to never hurt them again, to care for them and their children. In particular, women of color, women with disabilities, women who were undocumented (at risk for deportation) often had fewer options for jobs and housing that would support their families if they left the partners who abused them. For many of women, “the effects of multiple forms of discrimination” were part of the reasons they found themselves needing shelter.

Domestic violence remains at the forefront of women’s issues. Just two years ago, the World Health Organization called violence against women a major public health concern and a violation against women’s human rights. Estimates indicate that 1 in 3 women worldwide have been subjected to physical violence, sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. Vicious attacks on that women, trans and gender nonbinary individuals contiueare reported in the news every day. Each day, the impact of gender-based violence is felt not only by the individuals victimized, but also their children, families, and communities. And, this issue costs society billions of dollars each year in lost workdays, decreased productivity, and increased spending in healthcare.

At Chicago Foundation for Women, we envision a world in which all women and girls have the opportunity to thrive in safe, just and healthy communities. Through our grantees, we engage with women and girls directly and seek their ideas on prevention and solutions. We recognize the need for deep community relationships and as a singular organization, we realize that we can’t address the full impact and systemic causes of gender violence on our own. Through collaboration with others on the ground doing the work every day and investments to build more resources for women, we make a difference not only in supporting services, but also in preventing abuse from happening in the first place.

We know women need more choices for education, for job training, for health care and housing. We know shelter saves lives, but it isn’t enough. More and more programs are figuring out ways to include second stage housing, job preparation, childcare, and long-term counseling and need more resources to do so. We must also realize that as, Cara Hutto has described in an article in InHerSight, we need to understand the relationship between identity and power, that “everyone has different experience and faces oppression in various ways….” The needs of black lesbians are different from cisgender white women, are different from immigrant women, from women with disabilities. Understanding intersectionality helps to respond to individual women, girls, trans, and non-binary people with more effective help.

Through our grantmaking, we have supported organizations like APNA Ghar, whom we have proudly funded for over three decades and Women for Economic Justice, one of our newer grant recipients. These groups are teaching us every day what comprehensive services can mean to their clients. APNA Ghar provides critical, inclusive, culturally competent services like clothing, meals, legal resources, supervised visitation in a safe space and counseling to families seeking to change their lives. It also conducts outreach and advocacy across communities to end gender violence. Since 1990, they have reached more than 100,000 survivors and community members in the Chicago region.

Another of our grantees, Women for Economic Justice, seeks to build community power, especially among women of color, through engaging them in actions to build community and fight against structural inequality. They develop activists that work to organize in their neighborhoods to prevent violence.

These organizations are just two of the dozens that CFW funded in fiscal year 2023 that reduce the risk and support the survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. Please see our website for the full list of the strength and dedication of our grantees working to respond to violence against women, one of the most dramatic and dire forms of sexism too many women are faced with every day.

As I think back on my experiences working in domestic violence support and awareness, I’m inspired by how far we have come. But we must continue to learn, to stretch our understanding, to deepen the resources, to recognize our differences and how to respond to them, to imagine and create more ways to prevent violence, and never let up until no woman, no family endures abuse in their lives.

Together we will persist,

Sunny Fischer,

CFW’s co-founder, and interim President & CEO