When we talk about housing, what's lost in the conversation are the basic effects of living. It's important to have a place to live. If your home is completely empty, where does the child sleep at night? It's quite a simple and basic question that every parent thinks about.
Shelter Movers fills this critical gap by ensuring that survivors are able to take what belongs to them when they leave. That sounds logistically complicated, and it is, but it's really a statement by the survivor that what belongs to her, belongs to her and her children. We think about the psychological and emotional benefit for children who sleep on sheets where they recognize their smell. That is, we recognize the value of putting sheets on a mattress a child lays down on in a different place they're not familiar with, but where they can smell what they know and what they recognize. Something as simple as that is what our volunteers and staff can provide our clients.
A system that recognizes the very difficult decision to leave and the intimidation that many of our clients experience, and that provides a practical solution at scale across the country, is one that will make an enormous difference and help break the cycle of violence. When survivors use Shelter Movers, they report being far less likely to return to their abuser. That is a long-term benefit. We are 10 years old. We have served children who were eight years old and are now becoming adults. I think about those children very often. I wonder if they are going to become the survivors and abusers themselves, or was the presence of Shelter Movers on that fateful night, when the mother made that phone call, a turning point in the trajectory of those people's lives?
We are one component of the ecosystem of services. We work with shelters very closely, but because we fill that critical gap, it is the scaling of our system that will allow us to provide more value across more locations, particularly in rural and indigenous communities.