When a mother of six decided to flee a controlling abuser, Casa Myrna stepped in.
The Boston organization helped her pick up her kids, put the family up in a hotel for a month while they looked for housing, and helped with food and clothing needs along the way.
CEO Stephanie Brown said Thursday that family is one she wants state legislators to consider in the wake of a recent funding cut for domestic violence and sexual assault services. A loss of state funding, Brown said, could limit her organization’s ability to help future survivors in the same way.
“We provide financial assistance to 450 families each year, helping them with rent and utility arrearages so they can remain in their housing, with hotel stays when they need to flee and shelter is unavailable, with car repair so they can get to work, with food when groceries are unaffordable,” Brown said. “With these funding cuts, we will not have the financial resources to provide these kinds of supports.”
Brown was among a group of advocates who gathered outside the State House Thursday to call on lawmakers to restore more than $6 million cut from a Department of Public Health account in this year’s state budget.
Last year’s budget funded the account at its highest-ever level, and the roughly 8% cut this year leaves it at $73 million. As they crafted this year’s spending plan, budget-writers cautioned that leaner economic times and shifts in federal policy would translate to difficult choices about how to deploy limited resources.
The money in that account goes directly to programs that work with survivors of domestic and sexual violence, said Nithya Badrinath, policy director at Jane Doe Inc.
Badnirath told GBH News that it’s “pretty much the most flexible form of funding that exists to programs here in Massachusetts,” so there could be broad impacts when programs start to feel the hit of the lost dollars.
“So many programs use the funding in different creative ways,” she said in a recent interview. “It can range from survivors not having access to hotel vouchers if they’re fleeing an emergency situation, or immigrant survivors not just being able to get services and culturally specific programming or services that are accessible in other languages.”
Outside the State House, advocates said the cuts will affect programs across the state, in both urban and rural areas.
State Rep. Natalie Blais, a Democrat from the small Western Massachusetts town of Deerfield, said national research shows domestic violence in rural areas — where households can be geographically isolated and services like health care and public transit difficult to access — is more chronic and severe than in other settings.
The Resilience Center of Franklin County serves 26 towns, and many clients have to travel 50 miles or more to access its services, executive director Amanda Sanderson said.
“We do not have access to large foundations or a deep pool of private donors to make up for lost funds at the state level,” she said. “We will have to find a way to sustain our staffing and scope of services for as long as possible until we exhaust what discretionary funding we do have, and then the eventual outcome will be decreased outreach, longer wait lists and fewer advocates to support people in crisis.”
Asked about the funding Thursday, Senate President Karen Spilka left open the possibility that lawmakers might consider appropriating more money down the line.
“Preventing domestic violence is definitely on all of our radars and towards the top of it, clearly,” Spilka said. “We will take a look at what happens in the next year, so we will consider that and if we need to [supplement] it, there’ll be some consideration and meetings to find out, get more information.”
