Women's Advocates / The Story of a Shelter

Shortly after Women's Advocates shelter opened in October 1974, notes and letters began to trickle in from women who had heard about what we were doing and wanted information to help establish shelters and safe housing in their own communities. We tripped over each other in our eagerness to connect with other women with similar purpose, sending encouragement, along with our proposals, budgets, and forms. Our sense of isolation dissolved with this spontaneous network of women, many of whom we would meet years later through organized networking efforts, incredibly as part of a national movement.As time went on, the volume of requests for information grew, filling file after file, until it became impossible to distinguish one request from another, or to answer any but a few. With good intentions, we set forth to produce one readily available packet of information to be sent out in response to the hundreds of accumulated requests. In the summer of 1976, we did manage a first draft of this story, which almost made it to completion.Three years, 1500 women and children, and several revisions later, we returned determinedly to our story. Amid the crisis of regular life in a nonstop shelter household, we have put together pieces of the "packet" and added new developments. Written collectively over the years, the final product is a patchwork of the nuts and bolts, and politics and feelings of our shelter.It is the story of the many women who have lived and worked at Women's Advocates. We hope our story provides affirmation and some useful information to women working in shelters; and we would like the telling of this story to open up other opportunities for women to support one another and get what they want for themselves and their children.Those of us who have lived this story know it can never transmit all that it has been. We have laughed, cried, loved, and labored hard through the birth of this shelter, and of a movement. We will carry this experience with us always.