A Woman’s Place (AWP) provides a full range of assistance and support services for victims of domestic abuse and violence and their children, including a free 24-hour confidential hotline, a full-service residential shelter, individual and group counseling, legal and medical advocacy, and a children’s program. As domestic violence is a community issue, requiring community effort and support to successfully eradicate, AWP also provides comprehensive community-based domestic violence training, education, outreach, and advocacy.

Learn more about AWP by exploring the links below. Be sure to click to our Services page for more information on AWP’s complete roster of free, private, and confidential services.
Vision
A Woman’s Place (AWP) envisions a society free of abuse against women and children. In such a society, violence and other forms of abuse will be recognized as both unacceptable and illegal, and, as a result of this shared policy, all members of this society will reside peacefully in an abuse-free environment.
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Mission
A Woman’s Place (AWP) is a feminist, social change organization dedicated to achieving full social, economic, and political equality for women. To this end, AWP is committed to ending intimate and familial violence through empowerment and advocacy, support and direct services, with the primary focus on violence by men against women and their children. We work to change institutions, systems, and individual practices that condone and perpetuate violence and abuse.
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History
Founded in 1976 as a storefront, drop-in domestic violence counseling center in Sellersville, Pa., A Woman’s Place (AWP) incorporated as a private, nonprofit organization the following year. Above that storefront center was AWP’s first shelter for women seeking safety from abuse. The first woman seeking safety arrived with her two children at the tiny, one-room shelter apartment on Christmas Eve 1976.
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Board of Directors
Tam St. Claire, President
Lisa Angelo, Vice President
Kirby C. Castor, Treasurer
Susan Dardes, Secretary
 
Lisa Compton
Annette Conn
Karen Ferrante
Scott Fishman
Cheryl Garber
Jennifer Gavigan
Joshua Goldblum
Rose Hartle
Maureen Lee
Kathleen (Kip) Malloy
Kristin Ortlieb-Potts
Harold Pugh
Tamera Pugh
Sue Walker
 
Donna J. Byrne, Executive Director
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A Message from Executive Director Donna J. Byrne
Dollars and Sense
If you’ve poured a glass of milk or pumped a gallon of gas recently, welcome to the new “material reality” of our economy’s current “negative growth.” In non-economists speak, trips to the grocery store and gas station are costing more while giving you less. Tune in anytime for a daily dose of headlines trumpeting the economic “crisis, squeeze, crunch, and pain” that’s “sharp, wide, deep, and dramatic.”
 
The current economic cocktail of rhetoric and reality is enough to make anyone feel like battening down the hatches and waiting for the rainy day to end. But, not everyone is playing the waiting game.
 
The proposed federal budget now under debate includes the decrease and elimination of vital funding streams for domestic violence programs and services. On the surface these “cuts” can be easily attributed to an admirable, “tightening our belts” message of fiscal responsibility. The reality is that they represent a reckless political red herring whose impact will devastate the most vulnerable among us.
 
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) includes initiatives to help children exposed to violence, train healthcare providers to support victims of abuse, and provide crisis services for victims of rape and sexual assault. It continues efforts to help law enforcement respond to victims and provides support services to women and children forced to leave their homes because of violence.
 
VAWA has a proud history of helping, despite a constant shadow of underfunding. Historically, money authorized for VAWA has not materialized and initiatives have gone unfunded. The proposed 2009 federal budget includes a devastating 30 percent cut ($120 million) to VAWA, taking the financial viability of VAWA from bad to worse.
 
The Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) is a funding source for services that help victims of crime. VOCA funds counseling, legal and medical advocacy, emergency shelter, transitional housing, community education, and school programs that help victims and their children and communities in the wake of domestic abuse and violence, stalking, rape, sexual abuse, elder abuse, terrorism, drunk driving, and murder.
 
Under the proposed budget, VOCA funding will dramatically decrease starting next year. It will be eliminated by 2010.  
 
What’s your bottom line?
 
These cuts will not save you money, and will actually cost you in the future. In its first six years, VAWA saved taxpayers $14.8 billion in net averted social costs. VOCA is non-tax payer funded, and is supported by fines and penalties paid by federal criminals. Both VAWA and VOCA have saved money while saving lives. Underfunding and eliminating these programs creates extra strain on state and local law enforcement, criminal justice, healthcare, and social service systems. In effect, it eliminates ounces of prevention worth pounds of cure, replacing progress with penalties everyone will eventually bear.
 
VAWA and VOCA funding cuts will restrict and threaten programs and services that so many among us need to survive. Cries for help will go unanswered. Safety will lose its possibility. Hope will be forgotten.
 
Now is not the time to wait for the end of the rainy day.
 
Contact your representatives and urge them to protect VAWA and VOCA.
 
Better yet, show them how to spend money that saves lives. Show them that helping others also helps you. Show them that funding the protection of the most vulnerable among us isn’t a handout, but a hand-up.
 
Luckily, the federal government is prepared to fully fund your demonstration of civic and community pride.
 
In a few weeks, many of us will start receiving checks, averaging about $600 per qualified individual, from the IRS as part of President Bush’s economic stimulus package. Here’s what $600 buys you at A Woman’s Place (AWP), the only domestic violence agency in Bucks County,: six days of safe shelter for a victim of domestic violence and her children; 12 hours of answered hotline calls; 40 hours of counseling for families affected by violence; or 24 hours of education in area schools that can stop the violence before it starts. Make it count at www.awomansplace.org.
 
Like a lot of nonprofits, AWP is darn good at dollar stretching. But we know, every day, it is not enough. Need continually outpaces available resources. Eliminating resources will create a shockwave of devastation that will touch us all.
 
Winston Churchill said that, “You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” Your dollars aren’t charity; they’re change.

Click on the link below to download a .pdf of "Dollars and Sense"
Click
here to browse through the "Message from Executive Director" archives.
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