NEW HANOVER COUNTY — “A one-stop shop for support and rehabilitation services.” “The epicenter of restorative justice practices county-wide.” “A place of healing.”
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These are phrases in the New Hanover County Endowment application, submitted by the office of the District Attorney Ben David, used to describe a community justice center in New Hanover County.
The endowment announced $53 million in grants on Monday in its second cycle of awards since its establishment after the $1.5-billion sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center in 2021. This round, ramping up the total award amount by $44 million, is meant to fund larger projects and continuous funding needs; the endowment has committed $5 million to the DA’s community justice center over three years, one of the largest prizes this cycle.
The money will go toward staffing and outfitting two floors of the Harrelson Center, 20 N. Fourth St., to provide law enforcement, prosecutors and other services — such as sexual assault exams or connections to emergency shelter — a central location for victims of inter-family and youth violence.
According to the grant application, the creation of a community justice center will facilitate the DA office’s mission by “creating pathways to justice through integrated, comprehensive support services.”
“It will provide hope and healing for people impacted by crime, especially our youth,” the application states. “Simply put, we fight crime by building community.”
The CJC is modeled after the family justice center concept pioneered by Casey Gwinn, San Diego’s city attorney from 1996 to 2004. In 2003, President George H. Bush launched a national initiative to advance development of these centers and the alignment of complementary services.
Several centers were established in North Carolina, including in Guilford, Alamance, Forsyth, and Buncombe counties, along with the city of Charlotte. Though each center is unique in its community partnerships, each one co-locates victim services and judicial agencies to improve communication, cooperation and efficiency between organizations and provide a streamlined experience for survivors.
The DA’s office claims its center will go beyond the family justice center model, incorporating a restorative justice approach. The goal is to recognize mass incarceration is not a long-term solution and attempt to address the underlying, root causes of crime, potentially outside the legal system.
A notable difference in David’s proposed New Hanover County CJC is that the Wilmington location will be open to victims, particularly of domestic or youth violence, 24/7. A magistrate will be onsite to grant protective orders at any time, rather than certain business hours. The application states Novant Health has committed to conducting sexual assault exams and evidence collection on site, averting a hospital visit.
The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office and Wilmington Police Department will assign detectives to the CJC for investigative services. Law enforcement will conduct recorded victim and witness interviews, which the application states will happen on Closed Circuit TV to allow other professionals to hear the account without the victim rehashing it each time. When services are located separately, victims must visit each individual office and recount the trauma they endured multiple times.
Officers will also be charged with examining digital evidence for investigative leads, establish timelines to corroborate witness reporting and exonerate the innocent.
According to the application, Domestic Violence Shelter and Services will provide emergency and support services for survivors and their children, as well as prevention and education.
The Rape Crisis Center of Coastal Horizons will provide intervention, connect survivors with emergency shelter, and provide victim advocacy for sexual assault victims in English and Spanish.
The Carousel Center is charged with fostering “resilience and healing of child victims of physical and sexual abuse” along with education, prevention, and advocacy.
Legal Aid of North Carolina will also be onsite to provide support to those unable to afford an attorney.
These organizations have all submitted letters of support for the DA’s endowment application, along with New Hanover County, the City of Wilmington and Mayor Bill Saffo, New Hanover County Schools, the Administrative Office of the Courts, Chief Judge J. Corpening, and the Harrelson Center.
The latter, which already houses more than 20 nonprofits like Feast Down East and Family Promise of the Lower Cape Fear, submitted a joint application to fund the center. It was awarded nearly $1.6 million that will go toward revamping its third and fourth floors as the new CJC space.
Port City Daily’s request for the Harrelson Center’s companion application was not fulfilled by the DA’s office.
The DA’s office was awarded $3.4 million; of which $2.5 million will go toward eight new positions to work under the DA’s office. Among those will be an executive director, a chief legal counsel, and victim witness legal assistants; several prosecutor positions will also be converted to more specialized positions under the CJC, such as a domestic violence prosecutor and sexual assault prosecutor.
According to the application, the office has used grant money to cover temporary positions in the past, stating most of these employees roll into permanency as state funding expands.
In addition, funding includes $85,000 for legal and accounting services, $201,912 in office expenses, $30,000 for advertising and marketing, $210,000 for travel expenses, $30,000 to cover meetings and events, and $326,700 for capital expenditures, such as property, vehicles, equipment and computers.
PCD requested an interview with the DA multiple times after learning of the grant application in September. David initially refused, not wanting to influence the endowment’s process, and then canceled a scheduled interview Thursday due to an ongoing murder trial. PCD’s subsequent requests for an interview have gone unanswered.
A change in pressure
While the CJC’s intent is to help victims in one place, agencies already working in these areas — and who have their own independent operations, many within 2 miles of the CJC — could experience growth in demand. Nonprofits involved in the DA’s community justice center still have to provide staff and resources to the satellite office, plus be able to accommodate more referrals to their services.
Like other family justice centers, the agencies and nonprofits that work within it are still funded independently. New Hanover’s community justice center won’t be charging rent, but each agency will be responsible for funding its operations within CJC’s walls.
When the endowment announced grant recipients Monday, the three nonprofits that supplied letters of support — the Rape Crisis Center, the Carousel Center and the Domestic Violence Shelter and Services — were left out, though they applied. All three also obtained a grant in 2022.
These nonprofits rely heavily on grant money and donations to fund their operations. For example, DVSS’ 2023-2024 budget reports an expected $1.4 million in revenue, 50% from government grants and 50% from private grants, donations, fundraising and revenue from the shelter’s Vintage Values resale shops.
PCD asked the endowment why these organizations did not receive grants despite supporting the CJC and facing an expansion of services.
“The Community Justice Center grant supports standing up the center,” endowment spokesperson Kevin Mauer said. “That is just the first step. We understand that these organizations are an integral part of the center’s success. We look forward to working with everyone involved to make sure that all partners have what they need to ensure this model is fully supported.”
PCD reached out to each organization Friday; Mandy Houvouras, outreach director at DVSS, was the only person to respond by press. PCD asked Houvouras if she thought the CJC application interfered with the shelter’s request.
“I think anytime you’re introducing a big project like that, it can have an impact on other agencies’ applications,” Houvouras said. “With that being said, we have a long history of working closely with the DA’s office and we’re grateful for that partnership and that relationship. As a former court advocate, I’m still very connected to many of the people who work in the DA’s office, and it is those relationships that allow all of us to serve survivors in a better capacity.”
Houvouras said DVSS was planning on using any received endowment funds to pay for a new advocacy position. She also said DVSS has not committed to, nor fleshed out DVSS’ involvement at the CJC, despite the grant application stating “partner agencies will all have full-time staff located within the CJC.”
“Our hope is to be there,” Houvouras said. “The agency wants to be wherever victims are being served.”
The application also suggests all services will be accessible around the clock, which wouldn’t be new to DVSS. The nonprofit already provides 24-hour crisis intervention and staffs its shelter 24/7.
The Rape Crisis Center’s program manager Chelsea Croom spoke about its role at the CJC in an October interview with PCD.
“I think that it’s a good step in the right direction,” Croom said. “It’s not going to change our services. It’s just going to increase access to it.”
Croom said the Rape Crisis Center would continue to provide round-the-clock crisis intervention to sexual assault survivors and victim advocacy in the courts.
In a perfect world, she said, they would staff an employee at the CJC 24/7, but in reality it might look like more of an on-call arrangement similar to what the Rape Crisis Center uses now. Instead of being called to the hospital, perhaps, a staff member could be called to the CJC.
Additional employees may be needed, Croom told PCD, but the approach would be to work with the staff they have now and address growth as it became apparent.
“I can’t really see any pitfalls,” Croom said. “I think it’s going to be about communication. It’s making sure that everyone is understanding of what the vision is and that we’re all on the same page. I don’t think anything negative could come of this. I think it’s a positive thing.”
Houvouras had a more skeptical view, pointing out a dedicated space for collaboration on domestic violence cases is not a new concept in New Hanover County. On the fifth floor of the courthouse is the family violence unit, where law enforcement and the DA’s office come together with advocates and clients.
She also lauded the strong relationships that already exist among advocates and government agencies, crediting the domestic violence detectives, social workers and other nonprofits doing work in the county.
“And so if this [CJC] can add to that, then I think it can be a really good thing,” Houvouras said.
In 2017, DVSS provided direct services to 1,181 adult victims and 203 children impacted by domestic violence. When asked if she thought DVSS could support an influx of cases, Houvouras opted for a realistic point of view.
“Folks who work in nonprofits, and do this work because we love it, find a way to really trust in our leadership and our board and in our community to come together,” Houvouras said. “But I think we cannot take for granted the actual costs of this work.”
The model
The impetus for a family justice center is different for each community, but when communities recognize a need for action, they often discover their organizations are siloed. This can prevent service providers from maximizing efficiency and can create barriers for victims seeking help.
“What we see, and this happens in many communities, is when the victim was reaching out for help, they were having to go from place to place to place from the shelter to the domestic violence agency to DSS, to the courthouse to the district attorney’s office to law enforcement,” director of Guilford County Family Justice Center Catharine Johnson said.
In an interview with PCD earlier this month, Johnson said Guilford County decided to take action after 2012 and 2013, when the county led the state with the largest number of domestic violence homicides — 50% of all homicides were domestic in nature. It’s FJC opened in 2015.
Alamance County, the first to open a FJC in the state, started seeing a similar trend in the ‘90s. Its organizations noticed when filing restraining orders or interacting with law enforcement, victims were getting lost in the process that was supposed to put them on the track to safety.
Following a year with two murder-suicide cases involving domestic violence, the county put together a task force to target solutions and thus the idea of a “one-stop-shop” was born in 2005; the family justice center opened its doors five years later.
While operating 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., both the Alamance and Guilford centers partner with domestic violence, sexual abuse and youth violence nonprofits in the community.
The centers follow similar practices: survivors come in, they are triaged by a staff member who determines their level of danger, and then survivors decide who is in the room when they tell their story. Though the agencies work together, victim confidentiality is protected within each organization unless the victim consents for it to be shared.
Though restraining orders seem to be the most popular reason to visit, a lot of times people are just seeking guidance on available options.
“When [people] come in, what we’re doing is helping explain how systems work,” Sullivan said. “A big piece of why systems are so intimidating is because they’re not accessible, since you don’t really know how the criminal justice system works unless you have to interact with it.”
Both directors reported co-locating services saved them time; rather than driving a survivor down the street, they could direct them down the hall. Communication among agencies improved, with more people being connected to services they may not have sought otherwise and less resources being spent on the same case across multiple siloed agencies. Sullivan noted close quarters also keep the agencies accountable to each other.
PCD asked Johnson if nonprofits in Guilford County struggled under the strain of higher demand when the FJC launched.
“That’s one of the reasons people get hesitant to collaborate,” Johnson said. “They’d get scared that if they’re competing for money, that they would lose money, they get concerned about losing their identity in a collaboration. And I think that what we’ve seen in our family justice center is the capacity of the helper greatly expands as a result of collaboration.”
Johnson said her nonprofit partners write joint grants and have annual meetings to collaborate and reduce overlap and explore partnership opportunities. Many organizations “got a lot more funding” as a result because their service demands went way up, according to Johnson.
Sullivan said Alamance County’s CJC has never been threatened with having to shut down.
“We’ve seen funding get cut over the years to all of our partners,” Sullivan said. “We’ve seen taxes lowered, and there’s a lot of inflation so your dollar doesn’t go as far, but the center has remained there because it just has great outcomes.”
In Alamance, the FJC serves around 2,000 people a year, though some of those recordings represent the same person on separate occasions; sometimes they can see up to 36 people in one day. Guilford County sees around 13,000 people annually, sometimes 80 in a day, across two offices (Guilford is split into two judicial districts).
Johnson told PCD she started with a team of three. Now the center boasts 150 professionals from 70 different disciplines.
By streamlining the process, Johnson said Guildford’s domestic violence agency went from serving 350 people a year to more than 2,000.
As cited in the DA’s grant application, data from FJC sites consistently shows reduced rates of dismissals and an increase in offender accountability in intimate partner and family violence settings.
Sullivan told PCD Alamance County went almost five years without a domestic violence homicide after the center opened. In Guilford County’s FJC, there’s a process called high-risk team review for extremely dangerous cases.
“We’ve had no homicides associated with any of those cases and very high outcomes of offender prosecution and increased victim safety,” Johnson said.
The path forward
With grant money in hand, the DA’s office now sets out to stand up the CJC.
According to the grant application, David hopes to do so within a year. The first six months will consist of a security assessment of the Harrelson Center facility and staff will be sent to observe other justice centers in the state. The DA’s office will begin deploying its staff to the center and inviting law enforcement and service providers to move in starting at month seven.
Johnson and Sullivan shared some lessons they learned from their centers’ fledgling stage.
“What would have probably been the biggest stressor is just putting the energy into establishing what the family justice center culture would be, which is different from DSS culture or cop culture or courthouse culture,” Johnson said. “We had to spend some time building those relationships and having casual connections.”
She said the early days were spent mapping out expectations of each agency and choosing the right people to serve in the FJC. It’s one thing to hire the best, most passionate people though, and according to Sullivan, another to keep them and the community engaged past the initial startup.
“The biggest struggle is going to be around sustainability,” Sullivan said.
She noted the organizations involved, especially law enforcement, can have high turnover, so maintaining the culture and expectations is key to a stable environment.
The first shift in Wilmington’s newest project has already been announced, as the DA is exiting his office in September 2024. David told WHQR he would continue to be focused on the CJC.
According to the application, the New Hanover County CJC will measure success in several ways, including crime reduction statistics, community surveys, satisfaction ratings, how much the services are being used, an increase in community resilience and the 30 social determinants of health measured by Cape Fear Collective.
Reach out to Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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