FAMILY JUSTICE CENTER OF ERIE COUNTY INC
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Mission Statement
The Family Justice Center of Erie County provides services and support to individuals in unhealthy relationships, and the education our community needs to break larger cycles of relationship abuse. Our comprehensive and collaborative service model tears down barriers to service, enabling our clients to heal and cultivate hope.
About This Cause
Founded in 2006, the Family Justice Center of Erie County, Inc. (FJC) is the culmination of a decade-long community effort to develop the best possible means of responding to the needs of domestic violence victims. The FJC was one of the first 13 Family Justice Centers in the entire nation, and it was created to solve one of the biggest barriers to safety domestic violence victims faced: a fragmented system of services. Prior to the creation of the FJC, victims had to transport themselves from agency to agency, often without their own means of transportation and accompanied by their children. This process was time consuming and frustrating. It was potentially traumatizing, forcing victims to tell the story of their abuse over and over again to multiple gatekeepers. Worst of all, it was ineffective: too fragmented to access, not user friendly, and it lacked mechanisms for services providers to collaborate on complicated cases. Many victims, discouraged by the system or caught by perpetrators during the long process of attempting to coordinate services, returned to their abusive relationships. Today, the FJC provides free and comprehensive services to domestic violence survivors. Highly trained Domestic Violence Advocates work with our clients to determine all the resources they must coordinate in order to formulate a safety plan, and then coordinate the provision of those resources with our 13 on-site and on-call partner agencies. This “one-stop shop” model of service is designed to support and empower our clients, providing them with a calm environment in which to examine their options for safety and minimizing the number of times they have to tell their story. Above all, it is safer, as it prevents victims from encountering their abusers while traveling from agency to agency. Under this model, the FJC has become the leading non-residential domestic violence service provider in Erie County, working with approximately 2,500 clients per year. The COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed us down in this respect: though the majority of our client appointments are now virtual, 2020 was our busiest year on record, and we received 78% of all calls made across the county to domestic violence service providers.