6 minute read
Surviving the Storm
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
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 multi-jurisdictional planning body to develop a community victim-assistance center that combined law enforcement, medical providers, and social service 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, team-orientated, victim-centered wraparound team of many Treasure Valley nonprofit players.
Dinger has served Faces of Hope since 2016. “We’re opening our second location in Meridian. It was designed and modeled after a familiar service in California with wraparound services for victims. They knew that the victims they encountered going forward in legal processes had some support from other organizations, and they would be more likely to cooperate with prosecutors and law enforcement. The idea was to help take care of their basic needs,” she said.
The statistics reveal how prevalent domestic abuse still is, as the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence site reveals that, on average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States—one in four women, one in nine men, Black women more than white women, and completely under-reported in the Hispanic community for fear of deportation and cultural pressures.
According to Dinger, Faces of Hope serves about 20 people daily—between 80 and 100 people a week, totaling about 1,500 people a year.
Faces of Hope Foundation chose Drea Kelly as the Faces of Courage keynote speaker at the 2024 Faces of Courage benefit luncheon on April 9. Drea has become a powerful voice for survivors, featured in the Emmy-nominated Lifetime documentary “Surviving R. Kelly.” Her story of survival and transformation resonates with many, making her an influential figure in the fight against abuse.
Drea has transformed her personal experiences of marital abuse into a relentless mission to be “a voice for the voiceless.” Drea’s professional background is in dance, and she hopes to bring her stage show, “La Belle Jetè Cabaret,” to Las Vegas. Drea is also the mother to three children who witnessed her suffering emotional, sexual, financial, and physical abuse during some of the thirteen-year marriage.
R. Kelly was jailed in 2022 after being found guilty of sex trafficking, racketeering, and child sexual abuse, though the accusations of sexual misconduct were overlooked for decades.
“What was really important for me was breaking generational curses, but we only think within our family; you have to think breaking generational curses means beyond your family,” explained Drea, who watched her Baptist pastor grandfather beat women. “God, love, and pain were one for me. I did not choose to leave, and my son grew up in a household where he thought that that behavior was normal; when he becomes a husband, guess what? He’s going to repeat that behavior with someone else’s daughter,” Drea said.
Like most of us, she wants better for her daughter, and explained that she doesn’t want her children to see abusive relationships and think they’re normal or healthy and then repeat that cycle.
...I never want my children to remember the storm. I want them to remember how I came out of it because that’s the important part.
“The second thing was I never want my children to remember the storm. I want them to remember how I came out of it because that’s the important part. If we continue to think about the storm, we’ll never have the courage—or wherewithal to fight that thing through the end,” Drea said. It isn’t that she’s trying to hide anything from her children, Drea explained. In fact, she acknowledges that seeing her struggle and cry—her human side—is valuable.
“I teach my children that just because it’s hard doesn’t mean there will not be good days, either. It took a long time to get here. I will say that because when you’re a survivor, coming forward was about validating these women’s stories,” she said.