Yup’ik Women’s Coalition
Interviewees: Lenora (Bird) Hootch and Priscilla Kameroff 1. How did this work come about? And why was it necessary? We had a women’s shelter in 1979. The safe homes and women came together to discuss the importance of them. We live in a population of 500 members in village. When it became legal to import alcohol into the village it caused lots of violence, pain, and real abuse. Women had a safe place to go to avoid the violence. The village magistrate was very concerned about the violence and abuse directed at women with children being abused which created an opportunity to start a program in the village to deal with the violence. In 1983, we worked with the city council and they donated an old community hall to see how it might work out for a year; we were interested in how many people it might serve during the year. We had no funding and operated using only volunteers. Bethel had the nearest shelter and we were able to get information about how it operated and got some seed money from Bethel to operate. All we needed was heat to get started since we already had a number of volunteers. Before long, a lot of women were coming to center for to escape the abuse. There was a lot of drinking in homes and it ended up that there were 7-8 children in the center. We applied for grant to build a shelter going from a residential home to a shelter. We were getting donations and different funding through the state of Alaska. In 2005, the shelter was defunded, despite having community confidence and that there was still a big need. We felt like it we were discriminated against because funding was going to more women’s centers rather than shelters like ours. Working through Sarah Deer we were able to get a victim’s support grant from the Department of Justice, Office of Violence Against Women. In 2006, we applied for grant to do
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