A Woman’s Place Spruce Run marks 30-year advance on domestic front

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Sometimes success is marked by a blue ribbon or certificate of recognition, and progress is measured in charts and graphs. But for Francine Starks, ribbons and charts can’t represent the attitude of a 22-year-old woman who works at Spruce Run in Bangor, the state’s oldest domestic violence response agency.

“She thinks differently of herself as a female on this planet than I ever will,” said Starks, the agency’s community response and training coordinator. “She can’t even begin to understand that there was a time when this agency and the police and prosecutors didn’t all work together [to stem domestic violence]. It’s an awesome and foreign concept to her. That tells me that we have accomplished a phenomenal amount in 30 years. It warms my heart.”

Though Starks knows the war won’t be won until a shelter to house abused women is no longer needed and domestic violence is a foreign concept to a future generation, she is gratified by the battles that have been won as Spruce Run celebrates its 30th year helping victims of domestic violence.

The beginning

Thirty years ago this month a “rag tag bunch of divorced women going through crises” gathered at the Hammond Street home of Kay Lucas, a Bangor political activist who died several years ago. Going through the throes of a divorce herself, Lucas had a bigger house than she needed. Although she planned to rent out part of the house, it became instead a gathering place for “conscience-minded” women of the 1960s trying to escape bad marriages.

They had a desire to make a difference. Lucas, Lou Chamberland and Mary McPherson were women of the time, filled with idealism and overflowing with feminism. In those big empty rooms, they created Spruce Run, the third oldest domestic violence response project in the country. Incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1973, the agency was founded to provide free divorce counseling and a safe place for abused women.

With an initial $300 grant from the Bangor Baptist Church in hand, but with no domestic violence laws, no training, no education and virtually no support, the founding “mothers” of Spruce Run had set out on a long road.

A battered first client

The first battered woman to seek help from Spruce Run inspired the decision to encourage women to make their own decisions and help themselves.

The woman appeared at the Pine Tree Legal Office where Chamberland worked. Dropped off by neighbors, she was foreign, did not speak English well and was the wife of a military man. Both her arms were broken, her face was cut up and her entire body was black and blue.

Spruce Run had its first official client.

Chamberland and another woman went with police to pick up the woman’s children and some clothes. Then they drove the family to a house in Aroostook County where they knew they would be safe.

The pair drove right back to Bangor and went to work the next morning “pretending we hadn’t done this because we weren’t supposed to,” Chamberland said.

Several days later they returned the woman to Bangor, leaving her alone for a while at Lucas’ home on Hammond Street. The woman called her husband. When Lucas returned to her house, the husband was there.

“Her husband was there in his car, because she’d called him! And this is a very violent man and, well, we had a lot to learn,” Lucas said in an interview before her death.

“We realized we couldn’t keep bringing women to other people’s houses, and we realized that there was a whole lot of issues there that we were just learning about in terms of like this first lady calling her husband and – we felt – putting all of us in jeopardy because of what we had done,” said Chamberland. “We realized that this wasn’t going to work the way we thought.”

From that experience, the self-empowering philosophy that Spruce Run uses today to sustain victims of domestic violence throughout eastern Maine was born.

But sometimes victims go back to their abuser. Spruce Run provides them with information and options if they want them, but sometimes they don’t want them. For the founders of Spruce Run and for the workers there today, that is a frustrating and difficult fact to accept, but that, too, is a crucial part of the Spruce Run philosophy.

Spreading the message

“I remember back in the 1980s when we were just calling people and groups and begging them to let us come talk about domestic violence. We spent much of our time just trying to get on people’s agendas,” Starks said recently from her office at the agency’s home on State Street in Bangor.

Throwing a knowing grin at a co-worker, she said, “Now we are absolutely breathless trying to keep up with speaking engagements.”

Spruce Run, in fact, appears to be just about everywhere.

They are in police departments, providing regular training to police officers regarding domestic violence issues. They are in the prosecutors’ offices, informing prosecutors about the dynamics of domestic violence and why victims may not want to testify against their abusers or cooperate with investigators.

They are in the religious community, teaching classes at the Bangor Theological Seminary where they instruct students on domestic violence and how it relates to theology.

“Sometimes there are those who rationalize abuse by suggesting that religion somehow supports it and there are people out there who interpret it that way,” said Starks. “We want to make sure that we provide the training and information so that future ministers and religious leaders or counselors can deal with that.”

They are in the hallways of schools around Maine and in the hallways of the State House in Augusta.

The staff at Spruce Run spends about 5,000 hours each year talking and teaching about domestic violence.

Healthy growth

The staying power of Spruce Run is grounded in time, persistence and community support, Starks noted.

In 1973, the $200 incorporation fee came from Lucas’ divorce settlement. A hat was passed to pay the rent of the office. Sales of “politically conscious” crafts, cookbooks and baked goods helped to fund a telephone and brochures.

By the mid-1970s four people were on staff at the agency. Today there are 17. In 1987, the agency’s budget was $187,000. Today it is $890,000. There are two buildings, a shelter at an undisclosed location that opened in 1983 and the grand old home that houses the administrative offices on State Street. Both were purchased and refurbished with absolutely no debt, Starks pointed out.

“We’ve never had to carry any debt,” she said. “That’s a tribute to the people of this community: Those who go out there and help us raise the money and those who so willingly donate.”

The money to operate Spruce Run comes from state and federal grants and community donations, she said. Two capital campaigns, both exceeding their goals by about $50,000, resulted in the purchase of the shelter and the State Street office building.

Agency of change

Sue Bradford of Bangor, the agency’s program planning and integration coordinator, has been with Spruce Run since 1979. She started as a volunteer working the agency’s hot line and still takes hot line shifts today.

While domestic violence continues to be a huge problem across the nation, Bradford has seen “dynamic” changes in the past 24 years.

“We’ve really created a language,” she said. “When I first started working the hot line, there were many women who didn’t call what was happening to them abuse. They were unsure what domestic violence and abuse was. Now the callers seem to know. Surely it keeps going on, but I think people today are more willing to get out of an abusive situation, less likely to tolerate it than they used to be.”

And it’s not just the abused who recognize what domestic violence is, Bradford noted.

“Police officers have changed drastically in how they deal with domestic violence situations, in large part because of the training they now receive and because they have laws now that support them taking immediate action,” she said.

Over her 24 years with the agency, Bradford has tried to help women who ultimately were killed by their abusers. She gets through those times with the support of her co-workers.

“There are tears and anger, but you just have to keep going,” she said. “I am forever spurred on by the resilience and bravery of those who are living through abuse. It is a glorious thing when you witness someone’s life change when they escape that. They sound differently. They walk differently and it’s delightful to see.”

That 22-year-old woman who works in the office will never know a time when protection from abuse orders did not exist, or when abused women had little or no support and few options for escape, but she is well aware that domestic violence continues to plague thousands of women and children every year.

Bradford hopes that someday there will be a generation that hardly recognizes the phrase domestic violence.

“You know, in the early years, we wanted so badly to have a shelter so these women could go somewhere to be safe. Our goal was to hide them,” she said. “Now I think my goal is that someday we won’t need a shelter anymore, that some future generation will simply shake their heads in disbelief that people who claimed to love someone would hurt them. Course, I’m a product of the ’60’s, so I still want to change the world, and though I know it’s discouraging that abuse is still too prevalent, I do believe that it can still be changed.”

Those who need help can call Spruce Run at 1-800-863-9909.