The My name is Heidi Hill and I'm the grants and program director at Awake, which is

Abused Women's Aid in Crisis. And as far as how we are dealing with COVID-19,

being an emergency domestic violence shelter, we are still an

essential service and we want to remain open and available for the people who need our services.

But we are making quite a few adjustments to those services in order

to remain for our participants to remain safe and healthy and our staff remain safe and healthy and able to work.

So for example, we aren't holding our supported education groups in person right now.

We're doing those telephonically with case managers. We have staff who can work off-site doing

that in order to minimize the risk of exposure, you know having people in the building who

don't necessarily need to be there if they're not providing direct services we

decided would be better to have them off site.

And we are practicing a lot of social distancing in the shelter.

So we're asking both our staff and our residents to really work hard on maintaining that that six foot

separation in order to stay healthy. How is this pandemic affecting women seeking out awakes resources?

You know, it's early on, so it is hard to say.

One thing that we have noticed, we've done some preliminary comparisons of call

numbers and numbers of requests for shelter from this time last year, and then, you know, and then this month and our numbers are actually down which initially was a surprise.

We thought that the numbers would spike but you know the more we've we've looked at it we're

realizing that that's because people probably are not able to reach out to

access services in the way that they could before. If they are stuck in their house with

their abuser 24 hours a day, finding a safe time and space to call the crisis line for example or come you know to the front door

and ask for help and talk to somebody is going to be much more difficult.

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