YWCA Cass Clay marks 120 years of protecting women in crisis

Contributed / YWCA Cass Clay By Tracy Briggs Today at 9:00 AM Listen Comments Share Share this article News Reporting News Reporting Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. The Trust Project What is this? FARGO — Early in her career as emergency shelter director for the YWCA in Fargo, Barbara Stanton gave a presentation at a church when a man stood up with a question: “Are you trying to tell me I don’t have a right to hit my wife?” “That is exactly what I’m telling you,” she replied. ADVERTISEMENT Stanton still remembers the exchange. It captures something easy to forget as YWCA Cass Clay celebrates its 120th anniversary: Not so long ago, even the need for a women’s emergency shelter required explaining. The violence wasn’t new. But a place dedicated to helping women escape it was. The rise of shelters The modern domestic violence shelter movement took hold in the 1970s. One of the earliest shelters in the U.S. opened in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1974. In Fargo, the YWCA had provided lodging for women in Fargo for decades before opening its round-the-clock emergency shelter in February 1978 on the third floor of the old Bison Hotel on Broadway. Contributed / NDSU Archives Stanton became shelter director in 1981. Ruth Denton-Graber joined her the following year as her assistant. Together, they helped shape services for women and children at a time when much of the work meant figuring out what people needed, then finding a way to provide it. “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing in the ’80s. We really didn’t,” Stanton said. “We had no training, no background.” She credits a board of women who gave staff the latitude to respond to people’s needs. If someone needed a ride, Stanton gave her one. One Christmas Eve, they dumpster-dived for leftover Christmas trees to deliver to families. ADVERTISEMENT Occasionally, helping meant bending the rules. Tracy Briggs / The Forum One story stands out. A mother and her son arrived seeking safety from domestic violence. The boy was distraught about leaving his gerbils behind. The shelter had a strict no-pet policy, but they let the gerbils stay. They even had babies, and Stanton took a couple herself. It seemed like a small thing to do for a frightened child. Years later, she would learn how much it mattered. Somewhere to turn The YWCA’s work had been evolving since its beginnings in the Herbst Department Store basement in 1906. For years, its residence offered lodging to women coming to town to work or needing somewhere to stay. Contributed / NDSU Archives But the emergency shelter represented a change. Its rooms would provide temporary refuge rather than long-term lodging. ADVERTISEMENT A January 1978 Forum article reported that YWCA leaders had questioned whether to continue the residence program. With no other emergency shelter assistance for women and girls in Fargo-Moorhead, they decided the need was too great to abandon it. Volunteers assembled beds, sewed curtains and stocked the kitchen. Then the calls began. A woman leaving the hospital needed shelter while divorce proceedings settled financial problems. Another arrived with a child, no money and nowhere to go. A traveler stranded by blizzards expected to sleep on a bus station bench until someone pointed out the nearby YWCA sign. When staff learned she couldn’t afford a room, they gave her one anyway. Jan 29, 1978 The Forum (Fargo, North Dakota) Newspapers.com The need was being demonstrated almost as soon as the doors opened. For women experiencing abuse, leaving could mean confronting another frightening question: How would they survive? Without a job or money of her own, a woman had to consider how she would feed and house her children. Barriers to obtaining credit in her own name could make starting over even harder. Women might turn to relatives or friends — if they even had someone who could take them in. As late as 1986, YWCA leaders encountered assumptions about women’s financial independence. ADVERTISEMENT When the organization was preparing to move into a former sorority house near North Dakota State University, a board member seeking a loan was told she would need her husband’s signature, too, Stanton recalled. So what did she do? “I believe she went to another bank,” Stanton said, smiling. Contributed / North Dakota State University There were other attitudes to overcome. Shortly before the opening of the shelter, a local organization called womenABUSE questioned 1,248 people about family violence. Nearly 39% said they knew families in which physical violence was used to control family members. And 18.5% knew families in which a wife had been physically abused during the previous year. Yet some responses suggested many people believed domestic violence was only a problem belonging to neighborhoods with less money. ADVERTISEMENT That's not true. Stanton remembers women coming to the shelter from across the economic spectrum, even wives of prominent men in the community. Whatever their circumstances, arriving meant leaving behind the home and life they knew. “This is not a choice that people make,” Stanton said. “And I think it was incumbent on us to make it as welcoming and open and understanding as we could.” Building what came next Tracy Briggs / The Forum Residents of the shelter included women escaping domestic violence and sexual assault, older women and women struggling with serious mental illness. Stanton remembers government benefit cuts in the early 1980s leaving more women with nowhere to live. Denton-Graber remembers their frustration with gaps in mental health care. “You and I used to crab a lot about how there was nobody taking care of the mental health of any of these people,” she told Stanton. “And then here we are. We both ended up going back into that field and getting degrees in mental health.” ADVERTISEMENT Both women now work as counselors. At the shelter, they also recognized that immediate safety was only the beginning. Women needed somewhere to go afterward. “Fifteen years ago, we were witnessing women return to abusive partners because they had nowhere else to turn upon leaving shelter," said Erin Prochnow, the current CEO of YWCA Cass Clay. "The YWCA focused on building a continuum of housing, because victims should never be forced to go back to an abuser for lack of a roof overhead." The YWCA began transitional housing in 1988, initially serving three families. The following year, R.G. and Lorry Lyngstad donated a fourplex to help the program grow. Finding money to operate it brought another challenge. Staff gathered statistics and toiled over typewriters, trying to meet deadlines for much needed grants. In 1990, the YWCA received its first Housing and Urban Development grant for transitional housing. Chris Flynn / Forum file photo Prochnow says they currently provide stability to more than 350 adults and children every night through the Emergency Shelter and the Supportive Housing Program. On a recent tour, Stanton and Denton-Graber saw how far those early efforts had grown. Denton-Graber described herself as speechless. For Stanton, the housing programs were a chance to see what planting a seed could become. But ask her what still needs to be done, and she answers quickly: “Everything! All of the same things! She lists affordable child care and housing, mental health services, pregnancy counseling and help for people facing food insecurity. The needs that brought women to those first rooms haven’t disappeared. Neither has the importance of how people are treated when they arrive. Contributed / YWCA Cass Clay Stanton was reminded of that a few years ago when a tall young man walked up to her in the grocery store and asked her if she used to work at the YWCA. When she said she did, he replied, "You probably don't remember me, but you let me bring m