In July of 2019, DVCC expanded its on-site mental health program for survivors and their children. Our team recognized the need. We had a staff member, Carrie Richardson-Ozuna, a LICSW that was pursuing credentials and education to make this program a reality. Through strong support from Dionne Spooner, LICSW, the board, and a lot of work DVCC was able to build an in-house mental health team whose programming guidelines met state requirements and ethical standards. “We [now] triage our clients that come in based on our availability or like how we match up with the clients. Sometimes if there's serious mental illness or addiction issues that's not always our specialty we refer them to other providers. We wanted to make DVCC’s program more of a trauma-focused therapy program so it's very focused on the client's needs, meaning the client where they're at.” In March of 2020, when our country was faced with massive shut downs and stay at home orders, DVCC made the difficult decision to act quickly and transition to tele-therapy. Our clients only saw about two- week gap in services due to innovation in our center, intense staff training, and grant and donor funding. We had to learn and change our intake forms come up with the new consent for treatments for tele-therapy along with learning new computer programming for our secure platform and other intensive staff training while continuing to connect to clients through phone and email until our tele-therapy, online support groups and chats were up and running. This is now DVCC’s norm and allows for clients to connect with Carrie on their terms and their safe spaces decreasing no shows, transportation, child care needs, social stigmas, and other barriers clients often face. Her favorite pivotal moment from this year was the realization adaptation and innovation go hand in hand to serve survivors of interpersonal and sexual violence. This innovation has allowed DVCC to serve more people with therapy services than ever before. We hope to continue to grow this platform and serve survivors in a hybrid of in-person and tele-therapy moving forward while staying true to our roots of a trauma- informed, survivor- centered care approach allowing individuality and personal growth to be at the center of each survivor’s journey to healing. Your support makes this possible.
