A Safe Place / Lake County Crisis Center

Shelter & Crisis advocacy - we provided 31,927 nights of emergency shelter to 403 adults and 396 children. This included domestic violence survivors who stayed at the shelter facility as well as survivors and their children who received nights of shelter at local hotels. Hotel shelter is provided when there is no room at the agency's 33-bed emergency shelter. In addition, with the onset of the covid pandemic in march 2020, all emergency shelter clients were housed at hotels. While housed in the shelter program, survivors and their children received counseling and advocacy services as well as food, clothing, and other basic needs. A Safe Place also operates A 24-hour Crisis line out of the emergency shelter, also providing immediate in-person Crisis counseling for those in immediate danger. Support is available any time, day or night, for survivors in Crisis or concerned friends or family members who are seeking information on domestic violence and our services. During the year, we helped 4,678 callers to our Crisis line with supportive/caring listening/counseling, information, referrals, and advice. Program service accomplishments: danger. Support is available any time, day or night, for survivors in Crisis or concerned friends or family members who are seeking information on domestic violence and our services.

Counseling & therapy - therapists, counselors and advocates provided 30,626 hours of case management, advocacy, counseling/therapy, art therapy, and life skills training services to 1074 adult survivors and 529 child witnesses. These services were provided in english and spanish in both group and individual settings. Specialized art therapy is also provided to children and families. Survivors served included those residing in our supportive housing programs

Supportive housing & transitional living - A Safe Place provides both transitional/scattered site and permanent supportive housing to tenants/survivors of domestic violence and their children. For fy22, we provided (1) 80,516 nights of affordable, Safe housing in permanent supportive housing apartments to 124 adults and 160 children; along with affordable housing, the tenants received 25,351 hours of supportive services including advocacy, life skills training, and counseling.

A Safe Place is the sole provider of services exclusively addressing domestic violence and human trafficking in Lake County, Illinois. Guided by the mission of being the leading advocate for eliminating domestic violence and human trafficking in northern Illinois, A Safe Place offers comprehensive services that provide A safety net to assist victims of domestic violence, human trafficking and their children. Services are designed to meet the immediate Crisis and longterm needs of victims of violence and their children, to prevent future violence, and to help survivors achieve selfsufficiency. The continuum of services provided for victims of violence includes: A 24-hour Crisis line, A 24 hour on-call Crisis response services with law enforcement, case management, A 24-hour emergency shelter, 33 transitional housing units, 37 permanent supportive housing units, family, individual and group counseling, therapy and art therapy, A legal advocacy program that provides assistance with orders of protection, Safe custody exchanges, and supervised child visitations, life skills, employment, financial literacy and budgeting, advocacy, education, outreach , supportive services, Safe youth initiative (which is A violence prevention and intervention program), mentoring program for adolescent boys to prevent violence from continuing in the next generation, and an intervention program for perpetrators of abuse - teaching them accountability and helping them to examine and change their abusive behaviors over the course of A six-month program.family visitations and exchanges - A Safe Place's family visitation Center supervised and facilitated 974 custody exchanges and 747 visitations, with safety of children and survivors as the primary concern. During the year, 99 families (with 135 children) were served. 80% of cases involve families impacted by domestic violence, with the majority of the remaining families impacted by child abuse. (other cases involve sexual assault and stalking. )legal advocacy - our legal advocacy program, located in the Lake County courthouse, provided assistance to 1,429 survivors seeking orders of protection for domestic violence. Our legal advocacy team assisted survivors in obtaining 1,074 emergency, 5 interim and 0 plenary domestic violence orders of protection. In addition, we assisted 717 people to obtain other orders of protection including those related to sexual assault, and stalking/no-contact. Through the staff, including several volunteers, over 2,619 hours of advocacy was provided to survivors.outreach & education - we work to educate the community about the dynamics and effects of domestic violence, and advocate for survivors, while raising awareness of the services that are available through multiple outreach efforts by staff members dedicated to our education programs as well as through staff members from every area of our agency. Education and outreach are provided at businesses, religious institutions and other community gatherings. We also educate professionals such as social workers or law enforcement officials who may come in contact with domestic violence survivors. We provided over 717 hours of education and training through 769 presentations reaching 6,415 people. These presentations included addressing the issues of teen dating violence, through facilitating healthy dating presentations at local schools and agencies - to educate youth and teens 122 of these presentations, which work to prevent domestic violence through education on red flags, abusive dynamics and the options available for teens, were provided to 872 youths during the year.