1 LIGHTLY EDITED FILE Providing Safety for Domestic Violence Survivors in the Time of a Pandemic National Indigenous Women's Resource Center Remote CART July 8, 2020 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. CDT * * * * * This text is being provided in a lightly edited draft format, and is the work product of the CART captioner. Any reproduction, publication, or other use of this CART file without the express written consent of the captioner is strictly prohibited. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility, and this lightly edited CART file may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. Due to the live nature of the event, some names and/or terms may be misspelled. This text may also contain phonetic attempts at sounds and words that were spoken and environmental sounds that occurred during the event. * * * * * CART Provided by Jayne Carriker, RPR, CRR, CRC Paradigm Reporting & Captioning, a Veritext Company 612.339.0545 captioning-paradigm@veritext.com 2 >> The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. >> Hello, everyone. My name is Gwendolyn Packard, Ihanktonwan Dakota, training and technical assistance specialist with the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center. NIWRC upholds grassroots advocacy and promotes social change to address violence against native women and children. NIWRC is dedicated to strengthening the sovereignty of Indian nations, Alaska native villages, native Hawaiians and tribal communities by increasing their capacity to respond to domestic violence and enhancing safety for Indian women and children. Today's webinar presentation is on providing safety for domestic violence survivors in the time of a pandemic. It will focus on the challenges imposed by COVID-19 and the impact on advocates as individuals and their ability to provide advocacy, resources and shelter to domestic violence survivors. Stay-at-home orders, social distancing, wearing a mask, and other necessary steps intended to offer protection from COVID-19 often escalate the danger to victims of domestic violence and create barriers to safety. We have a lot of challenges in tribal communities, and 3 this pandemic has dramatically highlighted all our existing challenges along with introducing additional ones. As indigenous peoples we know that change is very much a part of our traditions, and this pandemic has brought about a lot of change as to the way we live, work, and address safety in our communities. On this webinar you will hear from three tribal domestic violence program shelters. We are thrilled to have with us today Deborah Bush, program manager Three Sisters Program at St. Regis Mohawk Nation in New York. Charlene Casimir George, shelter manager, My Sisters Place at Lummi Nation in Washington State and Keely Linton, executive director of the Strong Hearted Native Women's Coalition in California. This webinar will explore strategies advocates have created to navigate the challenges of the pandemic including issues of self-care, shortages of personal protective equipment, outreach, crisis response, shelter and working with law enforcement and justice systems as we deal with this deadly pandemic with no end date in sight. This webinar was made possible by a grant from the administration on children, youth, and families, family 4 and youth services bureau, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the panel and do not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I also want to point out that this webinar is being closed captioned and to introduce team -- Tang Cheam, our tech guru to explain how to access the closed captioning before we begin. He will also explain how the control panel works and how you can ask questions during the webinar. Also following this webinar there may be time for questions or comments. Please know that all questions will be responded to either during this webinar or as follow up by e-mail. This webinar is being recorded and can be accessed on our website at a later date. Tang. >> Thank you, Gwen. Hello and welcome everybody to today's webinar. I would like to take a few moments to highlight the Go-To-Webinar control panel, which should be on the right-hand side of your screen. So within that control panel there, you'll find a couple 5 of areas that are to help enhance your experience today, so the first area I'd like to highlight is the audio section. So within that audio section should you experience any audio issues during today's presentation, you can open up that section, and so if you're currently connected to the computer audio, you can switch that briefly to phone audio and then back to computer audio, and the control panel will attempt to acquire a new and hopefully better connection. Should that not work, you can open up that section and then leave it on phone call, and then you'll be given a phone number and a code and a webinar ID in which to enter in to acquire the audio portion of today's presentation over a phone call. The next section I'd like to highlight is the handout section. So we've got today's slide deck available in that section as a PDF file. So you should be able to click on the link that's in that handout section and download a copy of the slide deck today of today's presentation. And then lastly there's a questions section, so at any time during today's presentation if you have questions for our presenters or if you're having technical issues, 6 feel free to type any questions into that section. We'll attempt to as best as we can to try to resolve those issues while during the presentation or to answer those questions during the presentation. And as Gwen has stated, we'll make every attempt to get back to you if we are unable to have those questions answered during the presentation itself. For closed captioning, this link here, you can open up in another browser tab, you can open up using this shortened bit.ly link. And put that into the address bar. That will open up a page where you will see our live captioner providing the closed captioning for today's presentation. So if you would like to request a copy of that, the text from today's presentation afterwards, feel free to contact me directly using the contact us page off of our website at niwrc.org. So other than that back to you, Gwen. >> Great. Thank you, Tang. And also I just want to mention that your feedback is important to us. Please take a few minutes to fill out the evaluation form following this webinar presentation. 7 So before we get started and while people are still settling in to join the webinar, we're going to do a poll that asks, How are you doing during the COVID-19 crisis? And Tang will be putting that poll up now. And please click on the response that best describes how you are doing, and as soon as everyone does that, we will share the results of the poll with everyone that's attending today. So the poll is in progress. Please select one and submit. So we kind of get an idea of how everyone is doing here. We'll give that a few minutes. I think we'll -- I'm not sure, how long do you want this to run, Tang? Shall we move on? >> We've got about a 78% participation rate, so I can -- we can close it now, and I can share it, the results. >> Okay. So we'll -- we have 79% of people voting, and Tang will close the poll. We have more coming in. 81%. So the results of the poll are? >> So based on 81% of you. 8 That's actually not bad. >> I know. That looks great. It looks great. Thank you so much, Tang. >> Uh-huh. >> So please join me now in welcoming our first speaker Deborah Bush, program manager at the Three Sisters Program who will introduce herself and tell us about her program. Deborah. >> Hi, my name is Deborah Bush from the St. Regis Mohawk tribe. You can go to the next slide. Okay. So I am the -- oh, no, back. >> See, I'm not the good slide person. Here? One more? >> Yeah, no, right there is good. No. Okay. Right there is good. My name is Deborah Bush. I'm the program manager for the Three Sisters Program. 9 The Three Sisters Program is the domestic violence shelter on the Akwesasne territory. You can go to the next one, and I'll show you where we're located. Our territory is -- our territory is actually located in two countries and two different provinces, so we're in Ontario, Quebec and New York State. During the pandemic the leadership in our community shut down the border pretty much. The only ones that could cross the border from Canada into the United States were local native residents. So to give you a little bit of my background, I have been in the health services field for over 15 years. I started working in drug and alcohol program here in Akwesasne. I then went into prevention programs where we develop prevention programs with self-esteem, team building, communication, drug and alcohol. We went into the school systems from head start to grade 12. We developed prevention activities that we ran like for six weeks during the summer taking kids to high rope courses in the Adirondacks along with a lot of different activities. And then we would run one once a month through the 10 school year. The activities were all based with kids that were high risk. I hate using that term because anybody could be high risk, but kids that were identified through different agencies that might not have the ability to do high ropes course or go and do things that other kids are capable or parents would take them to do things, so we just started to develop a whole bunch of different networks. We also developed a prevention coalition. At the time we started, we started because our community has like two different programs. They have the American side programs and the Canadian side programs. So what we did was because nobody really had a lot of funding we combined everybody's funding and made one coalition. So at today's present there's at least 50 agencies that do big community events all drug and alcohol free in our community on different occasions. Next slide. Okay. So the Three Sisters Program, like I said, is a domestic violence program. 11 Our mission statement is that we're always there to protect, empower, and guide our sacred families. We are a victims services provider. We work with males and females with domestic violence, dating violence, stalking, harassment, sexual assault, sexting, sex trafficking, social media, any violent act that has traumatized a victim we have come into our program. We started taking men into our shelter last year. We probably had seven male victims that came through our shelter last year. Next slide. So our program consists of three different components. We have a safe house which we have a beautiful facility. We're actually located on a private road in a house that has four levels, four different levels and there's five bedrooms. Out of the five bedrooms, three of the bedrooms have their own bathrooms. And then we have two smaller rooms, and then a kitchen, living room, dining room, and then on the top level we have a play room for the kids. So when a family comes in, we usually give them the bigger room that has the bathroom with it so that if they have children, then they have private bathrooms. 12 We are -- so we have five bedrooms. One is also handicapped. But our capacity, like we had -- at one time last year or the beginning of this year, we had five victims and I want to say 16 children age 15 to I think the youngest was two months old. We -- it is a secure facility, 24-hour surveillance. We have security guards on staff there. We have three safe house monitors that work in there. Then we have a smaller building down below, and that is where the advocates -- so we have four Three Sisters advocates, and they respond to crisis calls, so they're on a rotating schedule where they work on call for seven days at a time, so they respond to crises that -- calls or they also go with police sometimes when police will call for a crisis call. They go to hospital settings with the victims, and they will be the ones that will bring them into the shelter when -- or the safe house when they -- if they decide to come in there. So then we have it's called safe haven, and it's a visitation and exchange center. So if there's a protection order or there's domestic violence or sexual assault and there's an order saying that the kids have to be supervised, we have a 13 supervised center, so we have two staff that staff that. They also will pick up the children and bring the children to the center, meet the non-custodial parent, supervise the visit. Then they'll bring the child back to the custodial parent. And that is usually mostly after school. During the summer the hours will change, but most of the time it's like from 3:00 to 7. Okay. Next slide. So that's a picture of some of my staff at Three Sisters. So we serve -- like I said, we serve everyone. Our funding sources are for our Native Americans or Alaskans. And there have been times where a woman has been in a community that she doesn't -- she's not from here but there was a domestic violence. We just had a severe domestic violence episode over the weekend. She's from way up in a fly-in reserve in Canada, so she's in our shelter. She's not a tribal member of our tribe, but she's in our shelter until we can help relocate her back to her 14 community. A couple times we've had non-native women that were afraid to go to their local shelter because their abuser knew where that shelter was and they would come in until we can try to find another place for them to go. This picture was actually during our honoring walk for domestic violence, and we had the male singers from seven dancers men's program come in, and they drummed while the community walked in honor of all survivors. Next slide. You have to go back one. So the COVID -- like I said earlier in the presentation, our tribal member -- our tribal leaders pretty much shut down the rez quick. They did a shelter in. They did non-essential personnel. Our program was deemed essential, so we just had to figure out different ways to operate and make sure that everybody was safe. We've only had three cases of corona in our community. Like I said, it was a shelter in. We still are under a curfew of 10:00 at night. We are under a 50-mile ban from travel. We are not allowed to leave 50 miles or you have to go into quarantine for 14 days. 15 So our community has shut down drastically. So what happened was we have the supervised exchange program, and we have non-native parents that were coming to visit their children, but due to their surrounding areas, numbers of corona increasing, it was a decision made by myself and my director to close down the visitation center because we were having a difficult time with protecting staff and the children that were coming in and the parents because we didn't know who they were in contact with and the social distancing, so we suspended all visitations. And once the courts closed and DSS in certain areas closed, a lot of parents were doing Zoom visits and other visits like that. We just recently opened back up our visitation center. We have one family that we're doing visits with right now. We've been working with this family for over two and a half years. So what we did was when they come into the facility, there is a box of masks. There's hand sanitizer. The desks where the monitors sit have the plastic barriers up, and we make sure -- the supervisor -- the visitation monitor makes sure that they stay social 16 distance apart. They also go outside. Instead of staying in a confined area, they'll go outside. We have swing sets and stuff like that so they can go out and play. All the advocates, especially when you're going to a call where -- like our community is small. There's about 14,000 people here, so most people know each other, and there's always the risk when you're going to an on-call crisis, you know, are they under the influence or what could happen. Well, with this we had to make more precautions because I have to make sure that my staff and the victims are still being protected from the COVID. So every advocate on staff right now carries a bag, and in the bag it has masks, gloves, hand sanitizers, thermometers and a checklist so they can go through a checklist to see what -- if they've been out of the area, if they've had a fever. There's a whole list of questions that we got off the internet. Most of the time right now, the police, too, they're not letting victims like sit in their cars. So they kind of keep them outside, which the weather 17 like I said is in the 90s right now. So they kind of keep them out of their cars right now and wait for us to get there and we do this whole long check thing with them. If they're at risk of being exposed or had come in contact with the COVID-19, we have designated a room at the safe house that we could quarantine them for 14 days. If there is other women and children in the house, then we've already worked out a policy where if the person in the quarantine room would need to come out to eat, what would need to be done, what would need to be disinfected, so we have temporarily came up with policies and procedures to protect staff and the victims coming in. The other thing is with the exchanges that we do, we're doing right now, every van is wiped down with disinfectant every time there's an exchange or visit. The visitation room too is wiped down and disinfected. The other thing is we have three different vehicles, so one vehicle is only for transporting children. One vehicle is only for people in the shelter. One vehicle is only for responding to crises. So each advocate depending on what they're doing is responsible for the disinfecting the vehicles and 18 letting the next person know that it was disinfected and what they did and how they did it. For me personally it's been a lot more stress because it's always stressful in a crisis situation, but now I have to make sure everybody is safe. In the beginning we could not get masks. We could not find gloves or hand sanitizers or any of the things you're supposed to have, a thermometer, we couldn't even find that. We ended up calling the local daycare that had closed, and they actually had a couple extra ones that they gave us to use, so we borrowed those. There was a couple local sewers in the community that started making masks and they called to see if we had any, so they donated almost like 25 masks, reusable masks for the staff to be able to use. We then started looking for, you know, gloves, whatever we could find. We are pretty fully stocked right now. After, you know, we would go into the stores and whenever we could find something, we would find it and start stocking it so that we made sure that staff was protected and also the victims. When it first happened, we had two women in the shelter, and probably for the first 30 days I didn't even let 19 them leave because it was shelter in, right? And they didn't know what was going on really because they watched DVDs or sometimes cartoons, but they don't watch the news. And they're like, how come I can't go to the store and get cigarettes or how come I can't do this or how come I can't do that. So we had to start explaining to them what was really going on and why it was so important to stay. So what happened was staff started to get comfortable because we knew these two families were safe. And then we had a couple crisis calls come in, and I noticed that they didn't wear masks when they interviewed the women. They didn't hand sanitize, so we had to go back through and disinfect the whole place and we had to talk again about we should be doing this every time somebody comes in. We can't just go back to relaxing because there's only been three in our community. So it has increased. I mean when it first happened in March, the numbers of victims that were calling were probably double what we had been working with, but a lot of it was women that had come through the shelter before or worked with the 20 advocates, and now they just lost their jobs. They didn't know how they were going to pay their rent. They didn't have groceries for their families. So what we did was we worked with a local grocery store, and we had pickups and deliveries on Fridays. So we did a basic grocery list of milk, cereal, lunch meat, fruit, and a little bit of meat, and we would provide groceries to clients once a week. We assisted with rent, utilities, because a lot of them felt like because of the sheltered in that they were being retraumatized that they weren't allowed to leave or, you know, and we just needed to make them feel comfortable, secure, and stable, you know, like you can take care of kids, we're going to help you. So that's kind of what's been going on in Akwesasne and how the community all came together quick and started whatever we needed to do to help the people that needed it. I think I'm done. >> Okay. Great. Thank you so much, Deborah, for sharing with us today. We do have two more presenters, and we'll have time for comments and questions following all of our presenters, and if you can please just put those in the questions 21 box on the control panel, and then we'll respond to those as we -- and when we end our presentation. So please join me now in welcoming Charlene Casimir George, and she's the shelter manager at My Sisters Place at Lummi Nation in Washington State. And Charlene will introduce herself and tell us about her program. Charlene. I think you have to unmute yourself. Oh, there you go. Charlene, are you ready? Tang, are we having some difficulties? Okay. We're having a little technical issue here, so I think it may have to do with Charlene's setup, so why don't we move on to Keely, and I'll advance the slides, and then we can come back as soon as we get Charlene's technical issues straightened out. So let me -- let me move to that. Okay. Here we are. And Keely, thank you so much for presenting today. Keely Linton, the executive director of Strong Hearted Native Women's Coalition in California. Keely. 22 >> Good morning, everyone. Or good afternoon for some of you. Thank you for having me, Gwen. So just a little bit about myself. I am the director of Strong Hearted Women's Coalition. I'm also a member of the Mesa Grande band of Indians. And I'm happy to be here. A little bit about our program is we are one of the 19 tribal coalitions across the country. We're based in southern California. We provide awareness and advocacy, primarily technical support and education for tribes, tribal programs, and you can go to the next slide, Gwen. This is just a map of kind of our area, so what's unique about our location is we service the southern region of California. So we look at San Diego County, Riverside County, and San Bernadino County primarily, although we do work with the surrounding tribes as well. So we're regionally based. The next slide. So the purpose of tribal coalitions again is to provide technical assistance, awareness and assist and advocate for tribal governments, state governments and the federal government as well. 23 So that's just a brief overview of our focus in the tribal coalitions. Next slide. So we got involved with housing our shelter program because we have a lot of small tribes in our area, small land based, small population tribes, but we have a whole lot. So there's about 34, 36 tribes here in the southern region of California, and in the area of San Diego County and riverside there was multiple tribal programs that talked about putting together a shelter, and because our coalition is a non-profit and we're not attached to any particular tribal government, we were asked to be kind of the umbrella of our shelter program, and so Strong Hearted agreed to be the umbrella program for the shelter. And so what our shelter came about was that we became a multi-program, so we work with all of the different domestic violence and sexual assault tribal programs in the area. We also cover multi-counties, and we work with different programs in those different counties. We also are multi-location, so we decided to house our program, our shelter off reservation, and we did have two different locations, and then we ended up closing 24 one location down in Riverside. Actually we had three different locations, and we closed a couple locations down in Riverside County because they weren't ideal. We have one location in San Diego county. The goal for this year pre-COVID was to open up two other locations, so our shelter housing, currently we are able to house three families, and then we utilized hotels for emergency, other emergencies that might come up if our shelter is full. And then we had planned to open two other locations. That was kind of delayed a little bit, but we are planning to open a second location in San Diego County and a third location again in Riverside County. So we're working with a couple people to open up those two other locations. And again, that was delayed again because of COVID delayed us. So that's just kind of the basic umbrella. So next slide. And then these are a list of our current tribal programs that we work with. So we work with -- we have two different Indian health organizations, and actually we have riverside in San Bernadino and dean health that should also be on this 25 list that I forgot about, but they are also on the list of one of the programs that we work with. The Avellaka program, the consortium that's both San Diego County and Riverside County. We have San Pasqual and Santa Ysabel domestic violence programs and we also have trauma links on sexual assault response team programs. We also work with the Rincon tribe and again some of the other surrounding tribes in the area but these are the primary tribal programs that provide advice and work with us and kind of got our program started. Next slide. We also provide legal assistance services through the California Indian Legal Services Program in the state. So again our legal services are multi-county, multi-jurisdictional. We set this program up to reflect the shelter program to provide services. Because our shelter was multi-counties, we set up our legal system as a multi-county service provider as well. Next slide. So just some things during COVID that really impact us again with the delay of our opening up of a couple other locations. We also have increases in calls, so we were full at the 26 time that shutdown happened here in California, and what we had -- what we normally do is our shelter is emergency-based, so we work on transitioning clients out of the emergency shelter and into other transitional housing. And one of our clients, actually the transitional housing closed down, and she wasn't able to transition out, so we just had all of the current families that were in our shelter shelter in place, and they remained there. Our shelter, again, is three families at a time, but that can be -- you know, depending on how many kids they have, that can be, you know, from three to, you know, ten people. It just really depends on the number of children. We also take in extended families, so if a victim is fleeing and, you know, their grandmother or their mother is living with them or, you know, grandfather too, we take male victims as well. We will take them into the shelter as well so that the family unit can stay together as much as possible. So again we can have multiple adults and children in the home at one time. So when we had shelter in place, what we did again was have them shelter in place. 27 We didn't -- we extended their time period that they could stay in the shelter and not have to worry about, you know, rushing to get out of the emergency shelter within 30 to 60 days. So we -- that way we provided them some security. We supplied them -- it was difficult -- especially when people were trying to hoard supplies, it was difficult at first to make sure we had masks and hand sanitizer and all of those things in place. More recently we've been able to get those supplies so we have a good supply of hand sanitizer and masks that we're able to supply to clients and incoming clients. All incoming clients go to hotels and they stay there until there's a location open at the shelter that we can transition them into or we transition them into another program, transitional housing or a non-native shelter program if that's possible. The difficulty during COVID with hotels was we had some jurisdictions -- so we relocate sometimes victims all across the state, and one of the counties further north from us would not allow a local person to stay at a hotel. They would only allow outside people. So oftentimes when people are in an emergency, we find a local hotel to put them into until we can relocate them 28 and transport them out. So that became problematic when some of the counties wouldn't allow local people to stay in hotels. The other issue with hotels was the meals. We like to use hotels that provide continental breakfast so it's easier for clients to get meals. Those all shut down. You could stay at the hotel but there were no meals available. So we had to do a little bit extra work making sure that clients had food and were able to access warm, hot meals. Again, that's difficult when they're staying long periods of time in a hotel and you only have a microwave. And so that's difficult -- that also became difficult for any children staying in hotels being kind of, you know, isolated in one room and not really being able to have access to outdoors. They could go to walks, but they couldn't use the hotel pool or things like that. All of that kind of thing was shut down. So trying to make sure they had access to be able to go and do activities and things outside the hotel. Again it was difficult. 29 We had to get a little bit creative especially because county parks and everything were being shut down, making sure that they had transportation to get to the local reservation to maybe get out and, you know, visit family, things like that if they could, if that was a safe thing to do. We were considered essential workers, and so all of our staff was open and available. Staff worked from home. We did isolate staff and clients. Staff limited their contact going to the shelter. So our shelter is -- it has a secured fence, and we have video cameras and security, but we don't have on-site staff on a regular basis. And so when the shutdown happened, we had to make sure that we were checking in with the clients in the shelters to make sure that they had all of their needs, that they were maintaining social isolation, and being able to, you know, maintain that for the other people in the shelter. We are now looking at -- because things started to open back up, and they're starting to close back down again, but we're trying to figure out some policies, good policies to put into place to introduce new clients into the shelter, and so we've gotten recommendations from 30 other shelters throughout the state both native and non-native to do that, and we're just looking at how do we maintain client confidentiality, and that includes, you know, their medical history and their health confidentiality but also making sure that other clients in the shelter are staying safe. Any new clients at this time will automatically go to a hotel to self-isolate for 14 or longer days before they're actually introduced into the shelter. We're also -- we also implemented some program coordination, and so we started weekly calls with all of the tribal service providers so that we could do updates and see how everyone else was doing. So a lot of the tribal programs were doing the same thing. They were, you know, working from home, self-isolating and limiting their contact with clients. Most intakes, interviews, things like that, were all done over the phone rather than in person. We did have a little bit of difficulty with transportation. Usually tribal programs either transported or we would get Ubers and things like that to be able to transport clients. And then Uber shut down. 31 We had to find, you know, taxis or some other -- if they could take the bus or some other way for them to find transportation. I know some tribal programs started to get plastic coverings so that the driver could be protected if they were to do a transport so that they weren't physically in contact with clients and they will still be able to transport, so they're looking at, you know, getting the plexiglasses in the vehicles and things like that. So we're still maintain weekly check-ins with tribal programs so that we can coordinate services for different programs throughout the county, throughout the several counties. Some of the things that impacted our traditional practices, obviously a lot of the tribes along with the county recommendations shut down, and so that included some of the sweats and local practices, even the -- we do have some churches on our reservation, so the local churches and everything shut down, so that impacted some of our people spiritually. One of the most difficult things I think that was coming out of the COVID was everyone's mental health, not only did we have to worry about our clients but worrying about ourselves mental health when everyone was social isolating. 32 It was a new dynamic to do things like this virtually all the time so talking about that and working through some of those things was part of our tribal weekly programming when we talked with other staff and other directors and making sure that everyone's health was -- mental health was still intact and that we had support for each other on that as well. And I think I kind of covered everything on this list. The only other thing that I realized, when Deborah was talking was one of the other issues that popped up for us was some of the legal issues. So we found, you know, when COVID occurred we had new issues as far as parents, one parent exposing a child to unhealthy conditions, and then -- or they were exposed somewhere and then they wanted to do their visitation and then that would potentially expose the child to unhealthy conditions as far as COVID is concerned, and so how does that play out in the legal system. Our court system didn't completely shut down, but they did leave it open for some virtual emergency protective orders that were left in place, which is good. And in California we're a public law 280 state, so we deal with state court as well as tribal court. So our local tribal court stayed available. Most things happened over the phone or virtually, and 33 some of our people were still able to get some orders in place. Other things like custody or visitation issues, a lot of those pieces were delayed, and so people were really unsure at first whether the orders were still good. The court system automatically delayed everybody's court dates, and so that just raised questions because their paperwork didn't say that everything was valid. So that became a concern whether law enforcement was going to enforce orders that looked like they were expired even though the court date was still pending because it was delayed. So that became a big issue during COVID as well that we had to work with the courts then and make sure that we were talking to people regarding that. Yeah, I think that's all for me. >> Thank you so much, Keely. And remember you want to put your comments and questions in the question box. We'll move on to Charlene Casimir George, shelter manager at My Sister's Place at Lummi Nation. And hopefully we've worked out all our technical issues here. So Charlene, welcome. Please introduce yourself and all the work you do and 34 tell us about your program. >> Hello. Can you hear me now? >> Yep, we can hear you. >> Fabulous. My name is Charlene Casimir. I am a involved Lummi native member. I live on the reservation. Our shelter is called Ne-Alis Towk, which is our language for My Sister's Place. The whole COVID thing has been really pretty interesting. I was fortunate, I was able to -- some of the people who the shelters in town in Bellingham after -- >> Charlene, if I can just have you move a little closer to your phone. >> Let's see. Is this better? >> Yeah, that's better. >> Thank you. Thank you. We've been very fortunate I think with our shelter. We started out a few years ago with a two-bedroom double-wide trailer, and we have the last few years moved into an area that has 14 rooms, and we're able to 35 house a few people. One of the things that we found is that, you know, we can set up one room for isolation for people so that we're making sure that they're clear. We actually have not accepted any people into our shelter for quite some time because we want to make sure that part of what they're doing is being tested and going through the screening process. Our Ne-Alis Towk is primarily a domestic violence, sexual assault shelter, and so we try to be really careful about accepting people who are just homeless because our tribe also has like three homeless shelters as well, so we try to be a little bit careful about that. The whole business of continuing our work here has been challenging. We're used to being able to just -- with the women that we have housed here if they need transportation, we just take them and do what's needed to be done, you know, whether that is taking them to go grocery shopping, taking them to pick up food bank food or medical appointments, whatever it is. We've been -- for a while there we had not been able to do that until our tribe opened us and said that we were essential employees, and then we came back for half 36 time, and then we came back for full-time now. I have -- we have not quite 24-hour coverage, but we're moving toward it, you know, so that there's more people here in case of emergencies or anything that needs to be done. The other fortunate part of this is I'm just five minutes away. My home is just five minutes away from here, so if necessary, you know, the ladies all know that they can call me at home or get in touch with me by way of Facebook or, you know, whatever it is that they need, and I will come right here for them. We -- excuse me. We didn't have a whole lot of masks or other supplies, but our women were outstanding. There was fabric, so they made a whole bunch of masks, and they made their hand sanitizers. They're just, you know, really, really outstanding crafty young women that, you know, went and made their way, did whatever they could, did whatever they needed to. We asked that we have the girls be more strict about curfew so that we know that they're not out wandering around and making people sick. As always, there's always the ones that don't want to 37 comply, and that makes it difficult, but, you know, usually what happens is I come in and talk and find out, you know, what's going on. We have had a whole lot of deaths. In one week alone we had three deaths, not -- I don't believe they were necessarily COVID. They were mostly just people who were elderly and not well. Our people usually when we -- you know, as part of our tradition when there's a tribal member that's lost, we gather at that home until they're buried and all the work is done. There's, you know, special ceremonial work that happens after the burial, and we just haven't been able to do that. That was one of the things that I felt really good about talking to other people because I -- you know, one of the things I was telling my ladies is we're all going to have some PTSD from this and we're all going to need to be talking about this and, you know, we have -- just in our shelter alone we have -- we have a house meeting once a week where we talk about all of our needs and talk about any of our issues. And the last few meetings, I came in even though we were asked not to, but I felt like I needed to be there so 38 that our women didn't feel like they were abandoned and had no one there to help them. So, you know, I would come in and talk to them, and when we'd have a meeting, you know, I would talk about how the COVID-19 is going and different ways, talking about different ways that we can keep each other healthy, and, you know, they've been really good about it. It's amazing actually. Yeah, the other -- you know, a lot of our other traditional practices had to be stopped. The shutdown came at a time when our winter ceremonies were just closing up for the end of the season, and so, you know, a lot of our people were unable to attend the last few ceremonies. A lot of the churches shut down and they weren't able to participate in that. Our sacred churches was closed down. Catholic churches were closed down. Everything was closed down. But I guess all I can say is in our language estee aumsum, which means I'm doing the best I can. It helps to be able to talk to other people, talk to other tribes and see how they're managing and doing, and we like, you know, have got to put together whatever we can to make things safe here for our people. 39 I can say that our legal system has changed somewhat in that I know that our women have -- our advocates have had -- I think it was by Zoom. A lot of things are being done by Zoom. Even our medical appointments are done by Zoom right now. They were allowing some people to go in for their appointments, but pretty much when I needed to see the doctor, it was by Zoom, and that's different. I think it was different -- it's an awkward thing to be able to sit in front of your phone or your iPad and talk to the physician and knowing that they're not listening to your lungs or anything like that because, you know, we're going through that camera. I don't know what else I can say. >> Okay. Thank you so much, Charlene. I'm glad we were able to get you in on this webinar. >> I know. It was such a -- I have to tell you my anxiety is way up there, and I so carefully wrote a whole bunch of things down, and it just went out trying to get in here. [Laughter] >> Yeah, amazing. >> And actually, you know, when you think about this, 40 for all of the people, I mean, you know, all of this technology has been able to help us keep in touch with the outside world, and I'm grateful for that to be able to -- I'm not tech savvy obviously. It's not something that I do really well, but who knows. Maybe I'll get good at it. [Laughter] >> That does happen sometimes. >> Yeah, that whole different generation, come from a whole different generation. >> Thank you so much. We have a few questions from -- and everyone, please put your questions in the question box, and we'll start going through those now. I think the first one is for Deborah, and the question is, is your facility open during the COVID? Do they have to be in quarantine for 14 days prior to entering the shelter? >> Our shelter has never closed. We were deemed essential personnel right away, so we've never closed. And right now we are taking women, and we have a self-quarantine room. We have designated a self-quarantine room, so like Keely was saying, we used to use hotels, but in our community 41 there's only one hotel, and that's closed because it's part of the casino and that's closed too. So we have never closed. Did that answer the question? >> Yes. And then there was a comment made about, I do like the idea of having an emergency bag and a checklist ready. >> Yeah, we -- you know, like every agency has to, you know, protect themselves. And earlier I had talked about the police department, you know. They're essential personnel. They're out there all the time. So when I mentioned that they -- they're not letting like people into their building or their cars, it's to protect themselves and stuff, so that's why we work hand in hand with them, and that's why we have our own bags so that no advocate will go out there unprotected, and they know exactly what's in their bag. They know exactly what's working, and they're protecting themselves, the other essential workers and the victims. >> I was just remembering, I haven't actually met you in person, but we were supposed to be at the FIFSA tribal grantees conference in San Diego that second week in March, and I remember you e-mailed me and said, They 42 just closed our reservation, we can't leave, we can't travel. >> Yeah, and I was really scared too because I kept calling the executive director and asking like, are you going to shut down travel? You know, like I'm supposed to be in California, and they're shutting down California, and then the word came across that they were shutting down. >> Yeah. >> But like I said, our leadership has really worked together because we have two leaderships. We have an American and a Canadian. And they have worked together to make us one community to protect all of us, and they closed it down quick. But like I said, they deemed us essential personnel right from the beginning. There has been an increase in domestic violence cases. The justice system, you know, like right now some of the offenders are getting charged but not going into jails because jails are not letting new people come in, so that creates a whole other ball of wax, and we're just hoping that the courts will start opening up more so that the victims are protected. >> That sounds great. We have another comment about how -- and this one is for 43 you, Deborah, about how they -- I like how your program thinks outside the box for the people to provide them a safe place. >> Thank you. We -- >> Okay. Go ahead. >> I was just going to say, we try to -- we didn't want to go to the grocery stores off the territory, so we worked out a system with the grocery store on the territory so we made sure that clients did not distress about feeding their kids. >> And another question for Deborah, and I'm starting at the top of the questions, and you went first, so I think that's probably why. But next question for Deborah, is how long can a survivor and her family stay at the shelter? >> Well, in our policies it says 60 days, but because of the corona, too, we kept some of the families longer because we didn't have places to transition them to, so we kept them a little longer. And we did run more programming with them because we have a 12-week DV/sexual assault education program that we run with women that come through there, so they got a little more intense version of it because they were 44 there a little longer. >> Okay. Our next question is for Keely. What made you determine that the recently closed location was not ideal, and so that the decision was made to close it? >> Actually it was -- actually it was just like about a year or two ago. We had a location that was -- it was not in a good neighborhood, and for some of our clients that were battling with substance abuse, it just wasn't a good area, and so we decided to close that down. And then we had another location that was in close to a major city, and it was just too far. We just found that it was just too far for the clients and connecting with the tribal reservations and programs and different things like that, so we just decided that that was too much of a distance from the reservation, so we closed that one down. So now we're looking at two other locations that would be closer to programs but far enough away that, you know, that they still provide some confidentiality and safety. >> And another question for Keely. I work closely with LGBTQ2S folks who are DV and IPV 45 survivors. Do you know of any LA or LB-based services I can refer LGBTQ2S folks who are native? >> I guess I would need a little -- I don't know. There's a couple programs here in San Diego area. I would have to -- I'm trying to think. I'd probably have to get back to you on the LA location for tribal communities. There are a couple programs, tribal-based programs up in LA. They're just not LGBTQ specific, but they do assist with LGBTQ. >> Okay. We have another one, a comment. I'm very concerned about the risk of our shelter becoming like a nursing home situation. I have created a protocol to keep our staff and shelter guests safe, but too many shelter guests are not willing to comply, and it feels like a constant battle for myself -- for my staff. Any comments from any of you? >> We have been dealing with the same issue, and because our community is opening up a little bit and there is a hotel in the next community, we've offered to put them in there because they didn't want to follow our new procedures and our new sheltered-in policies, so we 46 looked for other alternatives for them. >> And I think we would do the same. So this is Keely again. You know, we just -- I always remind our staff like our goal is to provide safety for our clients, and so if -- and that includes their health as well, and so if one client is not following rules and can't maintain, then we would look at other options. So we wouldn't kick them out or make them homeless necessarily, but we would look for other options for them to be able to stay safe without harming other clients. >> Okay. So there was another comment was, We are also taking fewer clients into the shelter so that we can keep one room available in case anyone becomes symptomatic and we have to quarantine them. >> That's kind of what -- I mean right now we don't have a lot of people in the shelter, but that's what we did too. We designated a room that is kind of separate from -- or not as close to the other rooms, and it's not far from the kitchen, so we would have -- be able to like bring food in there, and they wouldn't go through the whole building, so we did look at designating one room, too, 47 if somebody got sick. >> Okay. We have another comment. Hello and thank you. I am Hoden Shone descendent, keepers of the western gate and my daughters lived in Bellingham so have met and trained with the Lummi tribe. We're all connected, right? We're all related. >> Absolutely. >> How do our speakers feel about talking survivors into shelters? How self-motivated do they have to be? >> Oh, sorry. >> Sorry, I didn't understand that question. >> I was just going to say from my experience no woman ever really wants to -- or no victim I should say ever wants to leave their house and come into a shelter because it's unknown, they don't know who is in there, you know. We come from a small community. They worry about confidentiality. We follow every confidentiality rule there possibly is. We're in the middle of nowhere. Our location is undisclosed. But nobody ever really wants to come in, you know. 48 It's just about their safety, so we, you know, give them alternatives, like we have, you know, sometimes instead of coming into the safe house, they would rather go into a hotel room, you know, so we offer that. Like Keely said, it's about their safety and making them feel comfortable during a traumatic event. So you have to go with what makes them comfortable. >> And what I would say, we don't have any guidelines for, you know, how long they -- you know, if they come in, they don't have to, you know, just completely shut off from the world like some shelters do. So if they want to come in for a day and just see, you know, gather their thoughts, as long as we have that availability, we'll allow them to do that, and they're welcome to leave at any time. I'm still confused a little bit about the question because I don't know that I would necessarily talk a client into shelter unless you're just talking about kind of what Deborah was saying like if they were unsure about going into a shelter because sometimes I think our ideas of shelter is like homeless shelters where, you know, there are just a bunch of cots and things like that. When we talk about the shelter, we really talk about it being a safe home that, you know, it looks like a home. 49 It's, you know, in a residential -- you know, a neighborhood, so changing that perspective for them sometimes helps. >> And even changing the name, I think that's why we named it a safe home, you know, like for that. It's not that -- we've had women that have come in just to look at what it looks like, so if and when they ever make a decision to leave or not leave, they know what to expect. >> And another comment. Great job, ladies. I appreciate all you do to serve our people during this crazy time. And then we have another question. What kind of services do you provide for teens who are victims of dating violence? >> Well, we've done -- so this is Keely again in California. We've done a few things as connecting them with different support groups. We do talking circles for teens, and we've also worked with child protective services in the past to actually place them in shelter. So we've done that in the past. >> And this is Charlene. 50 We actually, we have had one advocate who has been absolutely wonderful in working with teenage youth, and she has picked up youth from, you know, probably within a 40-mile parameter to go to sexual assault groups. And she works also with the tribal school. She goes into the tribal school and talks about sexual assault as well. We have a young man who does real well with the young men too. >> Thank you. Another comment is New Mexico shelters and agencies stayed open running at 25% capacity and are now at 50% capacity. Is that kind of what you all experienced too? Are you serving more women -- or families now than at the outset of the pandemic? >> Here in Lummi we have less right -- we lost some women who -- well, I mean, you know, they come and go, right? So we've had women move out and, you know, we're down. Our amount of people here is down a little bit. But I think a lot of that too is because, you know, we just weren't taking anybody for a short time, and we're getting ready to do that. We do have a place that's set aside in case we need to 51 quarantine anybody. And we don't have a time limit either. I remember earlier you had a question, someone was questioning about how long they can stay here. We've had women stay here almost two years before they were able to get out and find a place, and we try to help them as much as we can to become independent. >> Thank you, Charlene. Another question is for any of the presenters. How do you -- how did you access children and schooling during the quarantine? >> So this is Keely. Our -- all of our schools were closed, and so they went to virtual learning, and so we just -- we made sure that all of the clients had access to computers or telephones, whatever they needed in order to be able to maintain that. >> And this is -- >> This is Charlene. We had -- all our schools were closed as well, and the schools actually presented the children with iPads or tablets too and provided them with homework to at least do some home schooling, and because, you know, for some kids school lunches and school breakfasts is the one place they have a guaranteed meal. 52 Well, people were concerned about that, and so our family services department delivered breakfast and lunch sacks to children who were in school, and, you know, I thought that was great to make sure that our kids are still eating and making sure that they have a way to continue to learn. >> And this is Deborah. It was pretty much the same. The local schools gave out Chrome books. The tribal -- I mean the chiefs made sure if the children needed connections to the internet there were spots in the community. It just came across that they're helping pay with some of the internet now. The local -- two of the local schools did hand out breakfasts, bag breakfasts and bag lunches too to make sure children were eating. There were a lot of programs besides our program that were making sure people had groceries. So I mean when you look at everything that's happened, everybody has come together to make sure that everybody is being taken care of. You know, that's one good thing about native communities. You know, everybody looks to see if their neighbor has 53 stuff, and if not, how can we help. Our leadership gave us raised vegetable beds and plants so that people could grow some of their own food, you know. They started to do a lot of different things to help take the stress off. >> Oh, that's amazing. Next comment is amazing work with such limited resources, which I agree. And we have another question. Do your programs and policies -- do your programs have policies and procedures in place for the COVID process? If so, can you share with other programs? >> This is Deborah. I just developed -- like for us as an essential program, the leadership wanted to know how I was going to make sure that my staff and clients coming in were safe, so I had to do like a two-page policy and procedure of what PPE we needed and how we were -- how each component was going to make sure they were safe. So I have no problem sharing that. >> Okay. And I'm thinking, Tang, maybe if they send it to me or to us, we can make sure that everyone gets that. >> Yes, yeah, we'll make that as a part of -- as an 54 attached resource to the recording, which would be available from our website. >> Okay. Keely. >> Yeah, we put into place a policy for our staff as far as testing and temperature checks for coming back to work. We also made available at the shelter for them to be able to take their temperature checks, and we just, you know, question periodically, you know, what their exposure is and making sure that they're still maintaining protocols. We have the CDC guidelines posted for cleaning the facility and making sure that clients are maintaining their responsibility for their own cleaning, and so we did supply them with extra supplies to make sure they're able to sanitize properly. And we haven't come up with a formal process yet as far as reintroducing client -- or introducing new clients to the shelter. We're working on that now. But one of the things that we're considering is just, again, it's questionable for their confidentiality and we can't refuse them services under our funding, and so we want to make sure we're still able to assist someone 55 even if they are COVID-19 positive, so we're kind of considering how do we do that to protect our staff but still be able to provide services. And so we're really looking at just maintaining, utilizing the hotels and having them self-isolate. And we can get them to a hotel without actually having to come into contact if they are COVID positive. >> Okay. Charlene, do you have policies too that you'd like to share with us? >> We would be coming right along the same as what everyone else has talked about. There's a process in order to come into our shelter, and they have to go through our advocates, and our advocates screen them, and we've asked the advocates include questions about whether or not they've been tested for COVID-19, and we actually are asking for people to be tested as they come in, and then we're preparing to have a room set aside for them to isolate if necessary. >> Okay. Well, we're coming close to the end of our time here. We do have one more question for all of you. Do you have any issues obtaining soaps or supplies or anything like that for your programs at this time? >> This is Deborah. 56 At this time we don't have any problem, and we just actually got funding from FIFSA, the CARES Act, which is giving us a little bit of extra money to, you know, like Keely talked about those plastic covers on the seats, we're purchasing some more car seats so we have time to rotate the car seats out and disinfect them. So with the extra funding we are able to put a lot more stuff into place so that staff and victims and clients are protected. >> Anyone else? >> This is Keely. We're doing about the same. We've gotten an influx of donations for masks and sanitization. We also connected with -- the national network to end domestic violence has set up a program to be able to order supplies, and so we've also ordered additional supplies through them. And then we also help to set up through our other tribal programs. >> Well, I believe we are at our time here. I just want to, you know, extend a warm heartfelt handshake to each and every one of you for taking time out of your busy days and schedules to provide this valuable information to other tribal domestic violence 57 programs and shelters, and I think you all are kind of an elite group of people here since we have fewer than 45 tribal domestic violence shelters in this whole country. So you guys are -- you guys are right there in my book. And I just want to thank you for the lifesaving work you do in restoring safety for survivors of domestic violence in your communities. And I'd like to thank you, Tang, for your technical support, and finally I want to extend a big thank you to everyone for joining this webinar presentation. Please stay safe and love and care for each other. Now I'd like to turn it over to our outstanding presenters for any closing comments that they might like to make. Deborah. >> Oh, we're going alphabetical again, right? You know, like I said earlier, you know, we're resilient people. Native Americans, we take care of our families. We take care of our communities. That's who we are. You know, we're a strong people. We just learn how to adapt and become more creative, and protecting is what we do. 58 >> Okay. Charlene. >> I heartily agree with all of what she's saying. We are strong people. That's something that when I had meeting with the girls, I'm reminding them that, you know, we as tribal people have overcome a lot of things in our lifetime. And in our history you think about the diseases that came and killed all of our ancestors, and I -- and what I tell them is that we'll overcome this as well, and we just keep moving forward. >> Thank you, Charlene. Keely. >> Well, I just want to thank you again for having me, and, you know, anything that I can do or our programs can do to help support anyone across the nation, I mean we're here, we're willing to help provide whatever we can. So I know we all just need to be supported during this time, and it's -- you know, we're all in different areas and going through a little bit slightly different circumstances, and, again, we're just -- I'm here and available to help with anything I can. >> Great. Thank you so much. 59 And thank you everyone for joining us on this very, very important webinar. [This text is being provided in a lightly edited draft format, and is the work product of the CART captioner. Any reproduction, publication, or other use of this CART file without the express written consent of the captioner is strictly prohibited. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility, and this lightly edited CART file may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. Due to the live nature of the event, some names and/or terms may be misspelled. This text may also contain phonetic attempts at sounds and words that were spoken and environmental sounds that occurred during the event.]