Crossroads for Women provides client-centered services to support women who are transitioning out of incarceration and homelessness. When a woman enters the program, she determines her own goals and wrap-around services are designed to assist her in accessing support needed to meet those goals.
A significant part of a client-centered approach is assisting women in creating a sense of empowerment and supporting them in finding ways to constructively engage with their community. Fostering a sense of empowerment helps women reject social stigmas associated with homelessness, incarceration, mental health and addictive disorders, and cultivates, instead, a sense of responsibility and community. Coupling this sense of responsibility with community engagement is fundamentally important in the development of community support networks, a perspective oriented to future achievement, and a sense of optimism.
Mentoring and group meetings give women a space within the Crossroads community to create a support network, but Crossroads for Women also works to create opportunities for broader community engagement. Women from Crossroads and Maya’s Place have spoken in front of a wide range of audiences, including Bernalillo County Commissioners and state legislators on the Criminal Justice Reform Subcommittee where they advocated for increased financial support for mental health programs and for criminal justice reforms. Clients from Crossroads and Maya’s Place also work with other non-profit organizations including the New Mexico Coalition on Homelessness and Young Women United to advocate for policy initiatives to increase funding for supportive housing and support women transitioning out of incarceration. Last summer, women from Crossroads gained a national audience when they participated on a panel discussion at the National Association of Women’s annual conference. Their talk focused on women’s experiences reintegrating into society after homelessness and incarceration and the ways that Crossroads has helped them to overcome those challenges.
KC Quirk, Executive Director at Crossroads for Women, explains that these opportunities “give women access to people that they previously understood as inaccessible.” Feeling empowered to tell her own story provides a woman the opportunity to use her experiences to make positive changes, not only for herself, but for others who are struggling in system that too often ignores women’s needs.
The clients at Crossroads and Maya’s Place understand their advocacy work as an opportunity to give back to their community and help other women. Gina, a Crossroads client, explained that it is important to take what she has learned and “not smother it, but to let it sprout” by using her experiences positively “as fighting power and as strength to help others with what I have learned.” Araceli, a client at Maya’s Place echoed this view when she stated that “the more we talk about these issues” and “put a face to a statistic,” the more we can demonstrate a need for programs like Crossroads and Maya’s Place. As Araceli elegantly put it, we need programs that “treat the whole woman: mental, emotional, and vocational” and understand that “we are more than our addictions and mental disorders.”
These community engagement opportunities have made an important impact both for the women personally and for the broader New Mexico community. Sandra, a client at Maya’s Place has spoken to a number of people including legislators, judges, and through her work on telephone campaigns with Young Women United. She explained that she never imagined that people in positions of authority would care about her story, but they did listen. Sandra explained that as she told them about her experiences, she felt powerful. Having policymakers and judges hear “what we go through gives you hope that things can get better. Women won’t have to lose their family or their lives. Things don’t have to be that way.”
On February 19th, New Mexico State Senator Lisa Torraco introduced a memorial to the legislature recognizing Crossroads for Women for outstanding community service, noting that the women’s advocacy efforts generated concrete legislative proposals that reflect the perspectives of women working to break the cycle of incarceration. During her presentation of the memorial, Senator Torraco thanked representatives from Crossroads for attending virtually all of the meetings for the bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform Subcommittee, remarking that their stories helped in “pushing the committee in ways they might not have otherwise gone.”
The memorial is more than a powerful testament to courage and hard work of the women who have stood up to tell their stories. It shows that their voices matter, they are being heard, and they are making a difference.
–Written by Heather Hawkins