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[Text: Sexual Assault Across the Lifespan National Technical Assistance Project Podcast Series.

Building community collaborations to serve victims of sexual violence in later life Part 2: Starting a task force.

In 2005, the Women's Resource Center of the New River Valley founded the Task Force on Domestic Abuse among Older Adults (now known as the New River Valley Elder Justice Task Force) to identify and prioritize current and potential initiatives relevant to elder abuse in the New River Valley and to coordinate activities that focus on older victims.

In this podcast, Mary Beth Pulsifer, Community Engagement Coordinator for the Women's Resource Center and facilitator of the Elder Justice Task Force, discusses how the group came to be and the ways in which they work together to better meet the needs of older adult victims in their community.]


Mary Beth Pulsifer: Our task force on older adults at the Womens Resource Center here is a coalition of service providers, so that would include both advocates and direct service providers for older adults, and any other person in our community who's interested in improving services for the older adult population. Some of the people who sit regularly on the task force are sexual and domestic violence advocates, direct service providers in the older adult community, Adult Protective Services workers, our long-term care Ombudsman, folks from the academic community, and specifically those working in social work and gerontology at a couple of local universities. We have a hospital social worker. We have a hospital forensic nurse. We have representatives from the faith community, mental health, and also just some community representatives, who are older adults themselves, and are interested in some of the issues that we've worked on. Some of them were previously volunteers with our program.

The mission was decided by the group, and the mission we agreed upon was to try to increase awareness in our community, and improve services to adults experiencing domestic or sexual violence who are over the age of 50. 50 is an arbitrary age, and people could select a variety of different ages. We tended to focus on 50 and above, because we found they had significantly different needs that they were presenting within our program than the younger women with children that typically came into our program.

I think the expectations and the needs of the older adult population are really sort of changing as the baby-boom group matures. I'm 55-years-old, and I think about myself compared to my mother. And my mother's generation, they would not typically reach out to a hotline. My mother probably didn't know what a hotline was, not a population that looked to counselors to address family related problems or personal related problems. And then you compare that to my generation of folks who are really quite comfortable in reaching out into the community for services.

And I think, also, when we do pay taxes to provide services and so forth, we have fairly high expectations that the services will be available and accessible to us. And so, I think, just from that perspective I began thinking as my generation gets a little bit older, we're gonna expect to see the services out there in our community. And if we don't do something to make sure that they're there, we're gonna be very disappointed.

So we really just started by inviting some key players in the community, and kind of kicked off the idea with a small training conference, and during that conference invited people to continue coming to the meetings. What we found at the time was that, in this community, there were very few really organized opportunities for people who were working with the older adult population to get together and talk about what was going on and to work collaboratively. In the years that we've been doing this, that has changed to some degree, and we now have more going on collaboratively in our community around this population. But at the time that we started, it was really, I think, seen as a unique opportunity to begin learning about what the others were doing, and to share information, and get to know each other.

Initially, I think our meetings focused almost entirely on just kind of getting to know each other, and getting to know what various organizations or agencies in our community actually did. What services we provided, because there really had not been much interaction. They were in their sort of parallel universes, that of domestic and sexual violence, and that of service providers for older adults. And so, just learning what was out there in the community and what people did, was sort of how we started.

Some of the things that we've been able to do with the fairly limited resources that we have; we now have developed a training for all of our volunteers on the special needs presented, sometimes, by older adults. And this year, been able to package that, and we'll be sort of distributing that to other programs, and so if people are interested in that, that would be something that they could contact us to learn about a little bit more. We've been able to assess our shelter environment. We invited folks from the Agency on Aging to come over and take a look at our shelter through the eyes of their clients and people that they worked with, and just sort of give us their view on how would an older adult coming into our shelter program view what was going on, and respond to what was going on? And as a result, we've been able to make some changes in the way we provide services in our shelter.

We've learned about resources in our own community. We've provided a variety of training conferences. I think this past year was the eighth training conference that we've provided. Some of those conferences have been local Virginia experts who have come in to help us, others have been national experts that we've been able to get a little bit of funding here and there to bring in. But these have always been well attended. And it's a different group of attendees than comes to our regular domestic or sexual violence conference, so we really feel like it is a significant outreach into a different community. The taskforce has been able to provide guidance for some research that we've done related to older victims. And the research that we were able to do, we've been able to generate data that we can use to try to get funds for additional programming, and hopefully that will be something that we'll be able to do in the future.

We've also been able to increase the number of referrals we're getting. There are groups out there who recognize us as a referral source and as a resource that probably never did before. The faith community has come around and really taken quite an interest in this issue and that's been a great asset, I think, for them and for us to be able to work a little more closely together.

One of the things that I think is very positive about having a task force that's sort of ongoing, is that although we didn't begin the taskforce as being something that we would need to apply for grant money and so forth, it is really nice to know that if an opportunity came along, we now have the data to document the needs in our community, and we have a group that can serve as an advisory group if we need that type of collaborative effort in order to strengthen our grant proposals. So it really has placed us in a much better position, should some opportunities come along.

Looking back, I'm realizing how much we've been able to do with really fairly limited resources. And so I would really encourage people out there to think about, you don't need a full time staff position necessarily. If there's somebody on your staff and you don't have the capacity to facilitate a taskforce of your own, simply identify in your community, what are the groups that get together as coalitions to talk about elder abuse or elder justice issues and trying to make time to go to some of those meetings and just begin to educate yourself on some of these issues and get to know some of those services out there in the community.

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[Text: 
For more information on the New River Valley Task Force on Domestic Abuse Among Older Adults, visit http://www.wrcnrv.org/helpingYou/co_taskForce.shtml.

For more resources on working with victims of sexual violence throughout the lifespan, visit www.nsvrc.org/projects/lifespan.

For training or technical assistance, contact resources@nsvrc.org. 

Thank you for joining us!

Copyright National Sexual Violence Resource Center 2014.  All Rights Reserved.  Parts of this document may be reproduced, copied, modified, or adapted for individual educational purposes only.  Commercial use and distribution of the contents of the document are not allowed without express and prior written consent of the copyright holder.

This project was supported by Grant No. 2011-TA-AX-K023 awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice.  The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this program are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women.]