Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance celebrates its first year of partnership

By Stuart Hedstrom 
Staff Writer

    BANGOR — In late 2013 domestic violence agencies Womancare and Spruce Run, which each carried out a number of programs to assist those impacted by domestic violence as well as preventive and community awareness measures in Piscataquis and Penobscot counties respectively, merged to form the Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance. The first full year of the new alliance was celebrated during the inaugural annual meeting on the evening of Feb. 5 at Rangeley Hall on the campus of Eastern Maine Community College.

A domestic violence awareness ribbon

    “We are so fortunate to have Julie Colpitts, executive director of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, here with us,” said Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance Advocacy Program Manager Cindy Freeman Cyr, who continues to work out of the alliance’s Dover-Foxcroft center on Mechanic Street. “She really became an integral part of our work three years ago in December.”
    Freeman Cyr said officials from what were the two organizations met with Colpitts in Bangor, where she “helped us understand there was a great spectrum available to us as we pursued the options before us.” Saying she was thinking of an analogy for Colpitts’ role, Freeman Cyr said, “She’s more like a pilot, a pilot who brings a ship into harbor. She knows where are the ledges and where are the barriers getting into the harbor.”
    Colpitts said when she began one of the first things she did was to recognize good partnerships, which included the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence working with the alliance and its previous two incarnations. She was part of merger discussions looking at “what is best going to serve people affected by domestic violence” and Colpitts said those involved were able to work together to move forward on a similar course.
    “You brought it into harbor not because it was easy, but that you knew what was best,” she said in expanding upon Freeman Cyr’s metaphor. Colpitts also said the Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance does a tremendous job in training its advocates to work with those impacted by domestic violence.
    The Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence has been involved in homicide and serious assault reduction for a number of years, Colpitts said, thanking the generosity of the coalition’s numerous law enforcement partners. 

Observer photo/Stuart Hedstrom

    HONORED VOLUNTEER — Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance volunteer Karen King, who works out of the alliance’s Dover-Foxcroft location, was presented with the Michelle Alexander Memorial Award during the organization’s first annual meeting on Feb. 5 at Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor. Making the presentation was Alliance Advocacy Program Manager Cindy Freeman Cyr, standing behind King at the podium, and Teen Services Coordinator Angie Alfonso.

    “What else are we doing to respond,” Colpitts said, starting with electronic monitoring pilot programs. She said such devices can provide “an additional degree of safety for survivors of domestic violence.”
    The coalition is also involved in combating human trafficking and then providing the necessary resources to fulfill the complex needs “for victims to establish safe and secure lives.”
    Colpitts said the risk to children associated with domestic violence incidents is escalating. As a result advocates are working to develop “a real understanding of what the child needs in that moment,” she said.
    Domestic violence can be carried out through technology, which Colpitts said for abusers “is another instrument of what they have always done, which is to intimidate, coerce and punish.” She explained that intimate images of the victims can be uploaded, pictures that were either private and/or are posted without consent,
    “Not only are they humiliated but they are having their work and educational options threatened, and they are having dangerous men show up at their doors,” Colpitts said about the aftermath of pictures and information being posted. “Our goal is to extend our protections that we now have into the digital realm.”
    She said the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence also focuses on social justice, to assist victims after the fact. Colpitts said the organization is helping move along legislation concerning safe housing and another to provide leaves of absence from work. The latter bill will “protect someone’s right in crisis domestic violence to know their job is secure,” she said.
    Other initiatives include engaging men, through programs connected with University of Maine students and an awareness of night with the Maine Red Claws, expanding training for mental health workers and batterer’s intervention programs.
    “When I was young I wanted to save the world and what I didn’t know was I would have to confront an evil that I didn’t know,” Colpitts said at the conclusion of her remarks. She then mentioned a story from her parents’ time as missionaries, saying how in an African village a ceremony was conducted with a cow with the participants all crowding around the animal in a ritual before the shaman eventually lifts the cow’s tail and gives it a slap to send it running away.

Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence Executive Director
Julie Colpitts

    “When you enter this work you are the cow,” Colpitts said. “What that means is you absorb what you experience.”
    “What I want to honor most is your commitment to be present with your heart and your mind with every person that you meet,” Colpitts concluded.
    “What we would like to do now is honor some folks who go above and beyond,” Alliance Community Response Program Manager Amanda Cost said at the start of the awards presentation.
    One of the honors bestowed is the Michelle Alexander Memorial Award, which was presented to Karen King who volunteers out of the Dover-Foxcroft office. Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance Teen Services Coordinator Angie Alfonso said King completed volunteer helpline training in 2013 and she “diligently works to end abuse.”
    Alfonso said King was present when Foxcroft Academy hosted a guest speaker discussing her experiences surviving horrific and near fatal injuries inflicted by her husband, meeting with students in small groups after the assembly. She also said King “answers the hotline at least two nights a week and at least three shifts a week in our office.”
    During Thanksgiving Alfonso said she had planned to cover a shift manning the phones, but King offered to be on call instead so Alfonso could spend the time with her family. Alfonso said that King described this switch as her gift to her, but said “No Karen, you are a gift to us.”