Project Impact for Youth

Project Impact for Youth Project Impact, Youth Advocacy
Safe Avenues works to provide immediate safety and shelter for victims in a supportive, caring and confidential environment. Safe Avenues advocates assist victims in assessing their needs and accompany them in obtaining resources for continued safety, empowerment, and self-sufficiency. Safe Avenues assists in the development of services for all family members in the cycle of domestic violence including child witnesses.

Priorities
Project Impact strengthens and preserves families by breaking down barriers to safety planning for moms and their children. When the children's physical and emotional needs are being met and behaviors are managed, the moms are more likely to be successful at parenting and able to maintain freedom from abusive relationships.

Project Impact offers:
  • Parenting education for moms
  • Support groups for child witnesses
  • Care for children when the moms are working on safety planning or attending groups
  • Networking with community personnel who assist children or on behalf of children
  • Referral and access to counseling services, school social workers, child guide programs, day care providers, mentorship programs, family activities, and children's events.
Project Impact advocates:
  • Participate on the Kandiyohi County Child Protection Team
  • Collaborate with community organization including the Blue Ribbon Council to promote prevention of child abuse
  • Facilitate proper identification and reporting of child abuse and neglect issues.
  • Work closely with domestic abuse and sexual assault advocates to facilitate safety planning for the entire family.
  • Focus work on meeting the physical and mental health needs of the child witnesses and stopping the cycle of family violence for future generations. To assist, secure services or ask questions, please contact the program coordinator:
"There is no system, there are only people--children do not fall through cracks, they fall through fingers."Marc Parent Turning Stones: my Days and Nights with Children At Risk
The Need for the Child Advocacy Program.
Living in a domestic violence home and witnessing the violence has a powerful negative impact on children even if they are not physically abused. Lenore Walker, who wrote, "Battered Wives" stated it well: "Children who live in battering relationships experience the most insidious form of child abuse. Whether or not they are physically abused by either parent is less important than the psychological scars they bear from watching their fathers beat their mothers. They learn to become part of a dishonest conspiracy of silence. They learn to lie to prevent inappropriate behavior and they learn to suspend fulfillment of their needs rather than risk another confrontation. They expand a vast amount of energy avoiding problems. They learn to live in a world of make believe."

Each child witness is affected differently and adapts different coping skills to survive. The effects can be physical symptoms, behavioral problems, poor social skills or cognitive difficulties. Child witnesses often feel guilt, anger, confusion, fear, isolation, anxiety, sadness, and shame. Children do not have to actually see the violence to witnesses and experience the devastating effects it has on the victim.

A program which offers help specifically for the children who come to Safe Avenues is necessary to diminish the damaging effects of domestic violence on children and adolescents and to stop the cycle of abuse and intentional injury.

The need for such a program was identified by reviewing client evaluations, by witnessing the behavior of children staying at the shelter, by recording the needs of the mothers who reside within the shelter, and by reviewing the barriers that keep battered mothers from remaining free from violent relationships.