A Conversation in Rochester About Improving Access to Domestic Violence Shelters

Kara Hoel-Kleese. Photo Sarah Whiting

I am the director of housing in Rochester for the Women’s Shelter and Support Center. Our transitional housing started in 1984 as a huge identified need — so serving people started in the communal settings, [as well as] supporting people who want to live in their own homes after getting out of abusive situations. We expanded to include rental units in Rochester, but affordable housing is not affordable here, where housing is catered to people working within the Mayo Clinic.

We offer rental assistance for a period of time as they transition, and case management accompanies that. It is goal setting based on what that family needs: financial literacy, workforce assistance coming in  on a regular basis, transitional and supportive housing. Our transitional housing includes care for children and pets; about 60 percent of our households here include children. We also work to get people an emotional support animal, which is so needed for people experiencing trauma.

We are the shelter for a 10-county area. That means people seeking safe shelter are uprooting from where their lives are and where they’d like to be. We are able to host about 18 families at a time in supportive housing, for up to 24 months, as well as to house 11 families currently in shelter. A shelter expansion, to be completed later this year, will allow capacity in the emergency shelter to increase to 75 individuals. Our crisis line is housed out of our emergency shelter, and we also have crisis staffing in Mower and Winona counties. 

Most of our housing programs are focused in Olmsted County, but we submitted a grant that will expand to Fillmore and Dodge County, in even more rural counties. Our federal funding currently is about 20 percent of our budget. State funding makes up a large portion of our budget. An advantage of being in Rochester is that there are generous individuals and agencies and networks. But [we are fearful about what] potentially losing that 20 percent of federal funds . . . will look like.

The individuals in leadership spend about 20 percent of their time researching and applying for grants and figuring how we can make things more sustainable. We know the need is much greater than what we’re doing right now. Rochester has 16 elementary schools in the public schools alone, and we would like to have the capacity to be in all of those schools on a regular basis, helping to share information about healthy relationships, because prevention work isn’t well funded. That’s the age where things start about modeling behavior.

We’ve worked into schools by talking to leaders about the public health nature of domestic violence. We also have biweekly calls with the school district to coordinate services for the kids who are trying to focus in school while living in transitional or shelter programs. 

When someone needs transportation to travel a long distance to get to us, we have a creative network. Day one out of Cornerstone offers tickets through Jefferson bus lines that are free and anonymous. Just like all other DV agencies, we take people from all over the state to get people where there is an opening. We use Lyft, if that’s available. We do use staff, or sometimes law enforcement will assist with transports.

We have pretty good relationships with law enforcement in Rochester and Olmsted County. That has been an initiative over the past three to five years, to help them understand our limitations and what we will and will not share. We have a court team and an intervention team that works closely with law enforcement. Our advocate in Dodge County has been with the organization for 30 years. Sometimes the relationships vary from officer to officer, but if interactions are bad, we bring that to the captains or people in charge to ask, “How can we do this better?”

We do trainings with organizations about red flags you can look for to recognize an abusive home environment. We started doing more intentional outreach. We have a support group in the local jail for female survivors. We want to get out to local health clinics that are immigrant focused, and into the neighborhoods where people are. 

What I would like more of the general public to understand is the basics of abuse. We see the homicides highlighted. Minnesotans are somewhat aware of the 30 to 40 people in Minnesota who are murdered every year — southern Minnesota recently had two domestic violence homicides within two weeks — but less about those people who are struggling inside a violent home, including the isolation and financial issues people face: 1 in every 3 women, and 1 in every 4 men are impacted by domestic violence. 

This fall, Minnesota Women’s Press will cohost a discussion with people in the Rochester area to talk about needs in the community related to domestic violence. We also will host a live-streamed forum about the nature of coercive control and misinformed media narratives at an in-person event we are currently raising funds to hold. To learn more after it is scheduled, sign up under the “gender-based violence” option here