Surviving the Storm:
FACES OF HOPE BY APRIL NEALE
Domestic abuse exists in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find it, including Idaho. And the stories are chilling. A seventeen-year-old girl accidentally glued her eyes shut after a battering that left her nearly blind; she was trying to soothe her eyes and reached for the wrong bottle. “After he had punched her in the face, she grabbed her super glue for her nails, put it in her eyes accidentally, and immediately her eyelid was closed together,” said Paige Dinger, Executive Director of Faces of Hope. “She asked her boyfriend for a week, ‘Can I please go to the hospital?’ He wouldn’t let her go because of the tell-tale bruising on her face.” One week later, this teen came into Faces of Hope. “She checked her phone repeatedly because he monitored everything, but her eye swelled shut,” explained Dinger. “We contacted our doctor, Dr. King, who took a look at that eye and said, ‘I don’t have the right equipment. We need to get her into an optometrist.’ Finally, we got her to the optometrist, who was able to get her eyelids separated, and a week later, she came back and received counseling. After receiving counseling and medical support services, she had a different outlook on life. Initially, she believed that she got what she deserved. In the end, a light went off, and she knew she didn’t deserve this. It was not her fault, and this situation is the hard part about working at a trauma center; it’s ultimately up to everybody that we serve whether they are going to leave their partner or not. And this one, we didn’t see her come back in.” Faces of Hope, a nonprofit, was created by three attorneys who saw the dead ends and futile system that women, children, and sometimes elders, often without any resources or help to escape an abusive situation, face. In 2004, Ada County Prosecuting Attorney Greg Bower, along with Prosecuting Attorneys Jan Bennetts and Jean Fisher, convened a multijurisdictional planning body to develop a community victim-assistance center that combined law enforcement, medical providers, and social service Faces of Hope Foundation features Drea Kelly as the keynote speaker at the 2024 Faces of Courage benefit luncheon in Boise, Idaho. PHOTO COURTESY OF DREA KELLY
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agencies. It also included a local strategic planning firm and an architectural firm to design a multi-agency facility to serve clients. In 2006, Ada County incorporated FACES Family Justice Center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit. The doors opened the same year. Today, Faces of Hope is a proactive, teamorientated, victim-centered wraparound team of many Treasure Valley nonprofit players.
