Domestic violence murder rates are at an all time high, but advocates are concerned they may not be able to keep providing the services communities depend on due to major funding issues.
Just to be clear about that, it wasn’t just this organization, lots of domestic violence shelters and support orgs across the country lost federal funding recently when Congress cut the budget for the Victims of Crime Act. Like, here’s another news story from South Carolina all about that same problem playing out there,
Yeah, I didn’t bother to mention it because it was unrelated to the BLM stuff, but it really sucks for them. Definitely a lot going wrong at once. And it sounds like there’s a pretty deep need where they’re at too.
They were getting large donations from the police department, and the police department stopped donating because of their support for BLM.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. From the article,
Then, Jacob Blake was shot by police seven times in Kenosha, prompting the statewide coalition of advocacy agencies Embrace is a part of to signal their support for police reform and Embrace to release an anti-racism statement.
In response, the local law enforcement groups, which had been close working partners, pulled out of collaborative groups and the Sheriff of Barron County resigned from Embrace’s Board of Directors.
Katie Bement is the Executive Director of Embrace.
“He notified us that he would no longer support the organization or advocates for our services when survivors called 911 and he contacted other departments within our service area across county lines and told them to stop working with us too. And they did,” explained Bement.
They had been receiving $25,000 annually from the Barron County Department of Health and Human Services, but that was cut after Embrace released their statement.
“There were a lot of attempts to try to figure out, kind of, how to repair those relationships and get the funding returned,” explained Bement.
“We didn’t think that we could do this work without the criminal legal system, without being aligned with the criminal legal system,” she said.
She explained that Embrace and local law enforcement agencies had spent years developing collaborative programming that Embrace didn’t want to see crumble.
Some of the 14 law enforcement agencies in the area still refer survivors to Embrace, but that’s the extent of their relationships.
Did you read the article? They haven’t lost their tax exempt status.
They were getting large donations from the police department, and the police department stopped donating because of their support for BLM.
Once again showing that the police don’t actually help anyone, and this was just an opportunity for good publicity to them.
They also lost federal funds unrelated to their BLM support. Looks like death by a thousand paper cuts.
Just to be clear about that, it wasn’t just this organization, lots of domestic violence shelters and support orgs across the country lost federal funding recently when Congress cut the budget for the Victims of Crime Act. Like, here’s another news story from South Carolina all about that same problem playing out there,
https://web.archive.org/web/20240515182502/https://www.wistv.com/2024/04/27/crime-victims-services-risk-40-federal-funding-cut/
Yeah, I didn’t bother to mention it because it was unrelated to the BLM stuff, but it really sucks for them. Definitely a lot going wrong at once. And it sounds like there’s a pretty deep need where they’re at too.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. From the article,
[Bolding added throughout]
I mean, yeah, there was definitely more nuance in the article that I didn’t capture in my ten word summary for sure.
I was mostly just rebutting the guy who was talking about tax exemptions without copy pasting the whole article, lol.
What article? We’re talking about stupid christians supporting an orange man.