Fair Haven Rape Crisis Center General Support

Happy Holidays!

December is a very busy month around our office as we collect lots of donations to bless our clients during Christmas.  We are very grateful for Grace Church and their continued support of our Christmas Star Project as well as our newest parter St. George Philoptochos Society!  These two organizations, along with some very generous individual donors collected gifts to provide Christmas for 82 children.  We also received additional donations of toiletries, clothing, purses, coloring books, gift cards, cookies, candy and so much more!  These additional items were made available for parents to take what they could use for their families during the holiday and throughout the New Year.  

In the face of adversity, our dedicated staff has perservered to serve survivors and continue to empower children through education. So far in 2020, we have provided 3,647 services to 248 survivors.  In addition, we have thus far provided 14,766 students with age appropriate Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Education. 

Due to the COVID restristions, we had to work fast to find creative ways for Survivors to continue receiving support.  Our work requires us to ensure a layer of security and protection for identifying information of Survivors.  With shelter-in-place orders, technology presented a huge barrier as most technology (such as zoom or google hang outs) are not compliant to our stringent security and privacy requirements.  

Thanks to our lcoal Legacy Foundation, we received a grant to launch our new website which provides survivors with a safe and secure chat box.  This technology provides survivors the highest level of safety & privacy and allows for survivors to chat individually with an advocate.  The technology will also allow Fair Haven to host chat groups and video chat with or clients.  It has been a great solution!  In addition, the new site has a "quick escape" button for safety and the ability to translate the entire site to Spanish with the click of a button.  Just another way we are working to remove barriers for Survivors.

As 2020 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to thank you for supporting our work and our mission here at Fair Haven Rape Crisis Center.  Without the support of our community (both near and far) we could not do this work!  Thank you for believing Survivors and sowing into their recovery journey.  Fair Haven was forced to cancel our Annual Winter Fundraiser and created a $10,000 gap in our general funds.  Our General Fund is so important as it covers things that our grants do not.  We are so grateful for every dollar donated to our General Fund!  Every donation, large or small, moves us closer to filling the gap in our budget as we stay the course and serve survivors.

From our families to your yours, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!