Oregon crime victims services organizations face deep cuts after losing federal funding

About 150 organizations that support Oregon crime victims have lost much of their federal funding. With more than $18 million in cuts and no additional state funds, nonprofits and government programs that serve survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking and child abuse are preparing to lay off staff and severely reduce the support they provide to victims — both in and out of court.

Melissa Erlbaum is the executive director of Clackamas Women’s Services. Due to funding loss, the non-profit will be forced to reduce the number of survivors it can serve by hundreds. And at Safety Compass — a nonprofit that supports sex trafficking survivors — founder Esther Garrett says the cuts threaten to unravel the vital safety net that advocacy provides crime victims.

Erlbaum and Garrett join us alongside Clackamas County District Attorney John Wentworth, to tell us more about the consequences of the funding shortfall.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. About 150 organizations that support Oregon crime victims have lost crucial federal funding. With more than $18 million in cuts and no additional state funds, nonprofits and government programs are preparing to lay off staff and severely reduce the support they provide every day to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking and child abuse.

Melissa Erlbaum is the executive director of Clackamas Women’s Services, which supports survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Esther Garrett is the founder of Safety Compass, a nonprofit that serves human trafficking survivors in the Portland area and in Marion County. They both join me now, along with Clackamas County District Attorney John Wentworth, who is also grappling with these same cuts. Welcome to all three of you.

All: Thank you.

Miller: John Wentworth, I want to start with you. We’ve talked a lot in the last weeks about the huge tax and spending cut bill that the president signed on July 4 and what that’ll mean for Oregon. But this federal funding cut that we’re going to dig into, this is actually a different pot of money?

John Wentworth: That’s right. It actually predates and the problem has preceded the current administration. It’s been going on for a little while, since at least 2017. It started from a fund that was created under the Victims of Crime Act, which we informally called VOCA. That was in 1984. So over 40 years ago, this act went into effect. That fund didn’t receive taxpayer money, it was all funded through criminal prosecutions at the federal level, mostly of large corporations. So when there would be a prosecution, a portion of the money that would be garnered from the corporations would go into this fund and help support crime victims nationally.

Miller: It would go to states and then states could disperse it?

Wentworth: That’s right.

Miller: OK. And what happened this year? You said that this has been being cut for seven years or so, eight years, but am I right that this year was by far the biggest cut?

Wentworth: Well, it’s become the most troubling. So the fund has actually been depleted by 90% since 2017. A lot of it comes from less federal prosecutions of those corporations that we’re talking about. So there’s been a drawback, a drawback each year. This year it’s facing a $600 million cut, which is basically we’re getting to the very end of the fund. So organizations like mine, or offices like mine, that rely on those federal grants to help sustain our services to crime victims – that’s the systems-based model – and other organizations that are community-based programs, like Safety Compass and Clackamas Women’s Services, are also dramatically impacted. We’re at the end of the funding, is part of the challenge.

Miller: So, Melissa and Esther, let’s learn a little bit more about what your organizations do. Melissa, starting with you, who do you serve at Clackamas Women’s Services?

Melissa Erlbaum: Yeah, at our organization we provide support to survivors of domestic and sexual violence, also some human trafficking, child abuse, elder abuse, and we provide that support to adults and children. And we do that through an emergency shelter program, housing, mental health counseling. We also have a walk-in center, our Family Justice Center. And we work with youth. We have a full spectrum of youth services and we’re also in the schools providing prevention education.

Miller: How much of your funding has come from that federal pot that John just talked about?

Erlbaum: So organizationally, we have a significant amount of government grant contracts and a large portion of that is federal. Specifically to VOCA, this will impact our budget each biennium, probably close to $450,000 to $500,000. Which is about half of our staff in our youth services program and about half of our staff in that walk-in Family Justice Center that I talked about.

Miller: You wrote in an op-ed about a month ago, in which you urged Oregon lawmakers to backfill federal cuts with state money – which they did not do – that if they didn’t do so, you’d have to cut frontline staff by 40%. Have you done so?

Erlbaum: I have. We have started that process already. We’re currently unfortunately in that reduction process. As DA Wentworth mentioned, this fund has been dwindling for a period of time, but in 2021, the United States Congress made a fix to VOCA that is starting to replenish the fund but not quick enough. There’s another bill that is before Congress right now, HR 909, to add additional funding in, but in the meantime the fund continues to dwindle.

In the last biennium, the Oregon Legislature strongly supported victim services. They ensured that there were no cuts due to these VOCA shortfalls and we were able to continue providing those current services. But this legislative session, we did not see that same support. So we’re having to cut that fund by 40% to 42%, which is significant for us.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the kinds of people who you’re letting go and what that will mean for the people they had been serving?

Erlbaum: Absolutely. So one of the best examples I can provide is that we are part of a Family Justice Center in Oregon City. This is a model where Clackamas Women’s Services and many partner agencies come together under one roof to provide services. And folks walk in the door. They don’t need an appointment, they just come in, they can talk to a confidential advocate, which is what we provide. So that sense of confidential advocacy where they can explore their options, they can understand what safety might look for them. They can have access to filing a police report or getting a restraining order if they choose. And I share that because imagine how scary it is to be experiencing harm, violence, abuse, and the thought of leaving that, leaving that home, taking your kids with you, having little resource of not knowing where to turn.

And when you walk in the door at the Family Justice Center, you’re met with somebody who can talk about those options, provide some level of support and security that there will be a safety net for you when you make that step. And now we’re having to reduce that. So that might mean we have to say no to all the people that are walking in the door. That might mean safety is delayed for people and what could happen in that time that safety is delayed. It also means we could potentially break trust with the community. So as domestic violence survivors walk in our doors, they’re testing the waters. Is it going to be safe for me? I know that the chance of me being harmed further when I leave is greater. So …

Miller: Because they have walked in?

Erlbaum: Absolutely.

Miller: Because their abuser may understand that they’re seeking help or that they could be in jeopardy?

Erlbaum: Absolutely. Yeah, so not having that or not knowing that that’s going to be there consistently is real troubling.

Miller: How many times might someone who needs help walk in your door before they decide to take further steps to get, say, the criminal justice system involved? I’m wondering how long it might take to build that trust.

Erlbaum: Yeah, so there have been studies on this that say it’s an average of seven times. I would say that it is at least about four or five touch points. They want to know that we’re going to be here and we’re going to show up and be able to support them.

Miller: But you’re much less able to actually provide those touch points now?

Erlbaum: Correct.

Miller: Esther Garrett, what about you? Who do you serve? What kinds of services do you provide?

Esther Garrett: Safety Compass serves human trafficking survivors. We are a regional program. We serve Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington and Marion County. And we are trying to be the first line of support for people in the community, hoping to point kind of a beacon of hope back towards the rest of the services in the community. So for example, if a child welfare worker or a law enforcement officer finds a child or a young adult, or an emergency room staff member, if they find someone they think has been trafficked, they’ll call Safety Compass out to the scene.

We have a 24/7 response team that will go anywhere any one of those frontline professionals is, and we’ll work with people and offer safety planning, emotional support, connections to resources, emergency housing. And they’ll wrap around those placements and make sure they’re connected to a mental health provider or an ongoing advocate. If they’re going to go with a follow-up interview with law enforcement, we’ll go with them to the interview.

And we’re trying to work with people who usually are very system-wary. They have been told by their trafficker, if they report, they will be harmed or killed, or their family members will be harmed or killed. So we’re helping kind of bridge the gap from the community into the services of support that exist.

Miller: When you say system-wary, meaning wary of the government? What’s the system? Are you the system?

Garrett: Yeah, we are part of it. As a confidential advocate, we hope to be the sort of farthest extension out of systems and into the community, because we hold that privilege in terms of what they share with us privately, it can’t be subpoenaed into court. But they’re often leery of medical systems, the criminal justice system, really any sort of social service apparatus that feels really formal, because they’ve been told, people report you’ll get your kids taken from you, you’ll be deported. So there’s a lot that’s been used to control them by making them afraid of connecting to services.

Miller: As we heard from Melissa, she’s looking at a 40% cut right now for some particular services. What about you? What’s the headline number for the reductions that you are facing right now?

Garrett: Ours is very similar. We are cutting our staff by just a little over 40%.

Miller: What’s that going to mean for the people you serve?

Garrett: Well, we know that we’ll be reducing all of our case managers in every county who do follow up work. We’re going to be reducing our ability to follow up with survivors, so that will be slashed. We’ve already made those notifications to staff that we’ll be able to do our emergency response, but our ability to follow up with people will be drastically reduced.

Miller: How important is following up? I mean, this seems like there’s echoes here of what I was talking about with Melissa.

Garrett: I would say it’s exponentially more for a human trafficking survivor because of their barriers. We have done case studies to look at their touch points to service before they get safe. On average it’s 37 times, as opposed to seven in traditional domestic violence …

Miller: What does that mean in practice? I mean, you say 37 times. Without divulging specific details about a case, what does that mean?

Garrett: For let’s just say a child, maybe there’s a language barrier, for example. And [in order for] them to access care, we first have to find them a really suitable translator. So that might take numerous attempts for them to feel like we can even linguistically communicate. And then they might enter support services with Safety Compass and then attempt to come into the family justice center. They might try that once. They might experience witness tampering if they’re involved in a court case and that might make them kind of pull back from services.

So there’s a lot of sort of testing the waters and then pulling back as their safety is kind of ebbing and flowing. So having ongoing services available to them and having confidential services available to them as that process unfolds is really life or death for them.

Miller: This is an important point because I think that if some people hear the phrase victims services, to be honest, I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is support to help people who have been through trauma and to help them move their life in an easier way after that. But what you’re talking about is helping people who are going through ongoing harm and helping them get out of that harm. We’re not talking about the past, we’re talking about the present and the future.

Garrett: Correct.

Miller: John Wentworth, what does victims services mean in the context of the DA’s office in your county or or any county in Oregon?

Wentworth: So to the point you’re just making, we’re dealing with folks who have experienced trauma. They might still, much like the two organizations that are represented here, be going through some of that trauma. We also have an additional layer of mandated services that we have to provide under the Oregon Constitution – notifying a crime victim of their victims’ rights, for example, and adhering to those rights.

You’ve heard about the cuts that these two organizations are going to face. I will be looking at a 30% cut to my victim advocates … It’s actually a little higher than that. I have 10 advocates; eight eight of them are federally grant funded. Three of those will go away, we expect, if this funding doesn’t come through.

Miller: What do those victim advocates do that’s different from what your line prosecutors do?

Wentworth: Well, our line prosecutors are focused on the law, representing people in the courtroom and grappling with preparing for trial. And much like, if you think of this in a medical model, you have a doctor and a nurse, right? The doctors are focused on the cure and the right medication, and the nurses are the frontline folks working with the people in the moment and making sure that their needs are met, that they’re comfortable, that they’re able to focus on their recovery. Our victim advocates are very much the same. They’re the personal contact that a person receives with my office.

Miller: Is there a connection between victim advocacy and securing convictions?

Wentworth: There can be. One of the challenges that we have … Let’s take domestic violence cases for example. The more contact we have with our crime victims, we notice that we have a better success rate as time goes on. As you might imagine, people get fatigued by the criminal justice system. Trials get reset. It might not make sense to folks if this is a very important moment in their life, why a case is getting reset or why there are legal challenges to something that seems very clear to them. And our crime victim advocates help bridge that gap.

One of the concerns I have is if I can’t provide those services, people will wonder, what’s happening with my case, who do I talk to, where am I getting support? And I’ve seen people just throw up their hands at times when they feel like they’re not getting the support they need in the criminal justice system.

Miller: And throwing up their hands means that they’re less likely to, say, to testify … or what does that mean? You can still prosecute or it makes it harder to make your case?

Wentworth: They might not show up, we’ve had cases where people … We’ve had cases reset four, five, six times. And I’m not just talking about violent crimes, but even in property crimes, people just say, I can’t take any more time off work. And if they don’t understand why that’s happening, their willingness to go forward greatly diminishes and then we don’t have a case to prosecute.

Miller: How much of that slack can be picked up by other people in your office?

Wentworth: A little but not much. Again, my attorneys, we get thousands of cases each year. I have 35 attorneys. So they don’t have the time, often the expertise, to deal with people in trauma as they need it, especially in the initial stages of a prosecution. As you might imagine, this is very challenging for someone to grapple with a life changing event. Perhaps their loved one has committed a crime against them, such as domestic violence or sexual assault. That takes a lot of human contact to help someone work through that process and attorneys just don’t have that time or that expertise.

Miller: Melissa, one of the issues that we’ve heard about recently in the context of other layoffs – for ODOT right now, we heard this this week, or the U.S. Forest Service or other federal agencies – is that many people who are losing their jobs will, ideally for them, be able to find other jobs, meaning that if some funding does return, it’s not at all clear that you all will be able to hire those people back. What kind of expertise might be lost?

Erlbaum: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s the expertise and it’s also the relationships that we’ve built over time. So I keep talking about this with folks. It’s the crisis that we just talked about. We want to be there when someone walks in the door. And then on the back end, we spent the last two decades building this system from the partners you’re hearing about today and others. There’s a lot of trust and institutional knowledge and just history there. So when you lose all of that, and you have to bring someone in and retrain them on how to build a relationship across law enforcement, public health, the school system, that takes so much time.

So right now, what’s happening is all the scaffolding that we’ve built is being crumbled. If funding returns or we have new funding coming in, we have really heart-centered, amazing staff. We have people that come forward to do this work because they care deeply about their community. And then there’s the training. They get 45 hours of specific training around the issues we’re talking about, and then there’s just diving in and doing the experience. So when we have staff that have been with us for a period of time, know how to do this work and know how to navigate all of these systems we’re talking about, the loss, it’s insurmountable.

Miller: Esther, all three of you are focused on the Portland metro area and your work, as you mentioned, goes down to Marion County. In a paper this spring about federal cuts, about these cuts, the Urban Institute wrote that “crime victims will not feel the effects of resource cuts equally.” They wrote that the impact is going to be “especially harsh on rural communities and smaller agencies,” which they wrote are “already stretched thin.” Is that true in Oregon as well? Are the kinds of agencies who do the work you do, who are outside of the Willamette Valley, in even worse straits than you are?

Garrett: I would venture to say yes. And I’m speaking as a small organization. I think we have built these amazing family justice center models in multiple counties, which is what we referenced earlier. If people can get to them, they are fantastic because we have so many services within them.

But in really rural communities, there’s a lot of people who, there’s no proximity to services for them. So they’re very isolated already. And if you only have maybe one service provider in a very rural county, let’s just say, and they get reduced by 50% or more, in some cases they’re talking about more than that in some of those programs, there may be no one at all available to you. What would it be like to imagine a safety plan where you’re seeking services out of county, even. I just think people’s ability to problem solve is based on what options they have. When you have that few options, some people are forced with staying exposed to violence or just having really drastically reduced options.

At Safety Compass, we’re a small organization. Our feeling of a 40% reduction is pretty extreme. We are in a pretty resource rich community and we still are seeing gaps in our ability to respond, gaps in our case management will happen. We will lose all of the task force coordination for every human trafficking task force and MDT, a multidisciplinary team, in a three county region. And with human trafficking specifically, it’s not a crime where people walk into buildings and ask for help. Usually they’re so controlled and isolated, you have to have an assertive model to go out and basically find them and offer services, and without multidisciplinary teams doing that work, we will not be able to go out and find them.

Miller: Are you talking with other groups that … It doesn’t seem like anyone does exactly what you do in the areas you serve, but are there conversations happening right now about new partnerships that can at least make these cuts less terrible?

Garrett: I think we’ve talked about technology as a method of creating more access for people. It’s not ideal, but we have talked about stop gaps like that. We certainly are looking at collaboration all the time with wonderful programs like Clackamas Women’s Services, like Family Justice Centers, but I think it’s important to know that collaboration and innovation will not solve all of these gaps. We are going to look at cuts that will leave actual legitimate gaps and people’s safety will be at risk because of them, even with the steps we’re taking to collaborate.

Miller: Melissa, what kind of stopgap efforts are you looking at right now, even if, as Esther says, they’re not going to replace the human capital that you’re losing?

Erlbaum: That’s a great question. It’s a hard one. In this landscape where we are facing pressures of not just this fund but other federal funds, we had a loss of state funding as well for victim services, there are not as many levers to pull. So similar to what Esther was saying, we are going deeper on those collaborations. We’re trying to do as much outreach as we can so people know we’re available. But again, without that sort of point in time, human contact, I do really feel like we’re going to see a significant rise in violence in our community.

Miller: John Wentworth, we heard earlier that Congress did make a change, but it hasn’t, I guess, borne fruit yet in terms of the VOCA funding. So what does the medium term look like to you at the federal level?

Wentworth: Well, we don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen. There’s a bill that’s pending, as Melissa referred to, HR 909, which will hopefully fund the Crime Victims Fund sufficiently. There are now 218 representatives who have signed on to that, which tells …

Miller: In the U.S. House?

Wentworth: In the U.S. House, which tells everyone, OK, we have the votes to get it off the House floor, if we can get that far. Then it has to make it through the Senate, it has to be signed by the president.

Miller: So there’s been historically bipartisan support for crime victims funding?

Wentworth: Absolutely. This cuts across political divides, so that’s very helpful in this realm.

Miller: But you don’t seem particularly positive right now.

Wentworth: Well, because as you’ve heard, my organization, I’m OK until the end of September, right? But we have organizations that we rely on as well, these nonprofit organizations that supply resources to our crime victims, who are already making cuts. We’re already in crisis mode.

Miller: So that I appreciate that. I guess what I meant is that it doesn’t seem like you have faith in the U.S. Congress going forward, that they will necessarily give you more money later.

Wentworth: We always wonder, right? And even if this bill goes forward and becomes law, it’s only good for four years. So for more than 40 years, we have been very unstable in this area. The funding’s been there, but we always wonder, is it gonna be there in the next few years? And that’s the challenge.

Miller: John Wentworth, Melissa Erlbaum and Esther Garrett, thanks very much.

Garrett: Thank you.

Wentworth: Thank you very much.

Erlbaum: Thank you.

Miller: John Wentworth is the district attorney of Clackamas County; Melissa Erlbaum is the executive director of Clackamas Women’s Services; and Esther Garrett is the executive director of Safety Compass.

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