Monarch Services, county bring programs with justice as intent
SANTA CRUZ >> In 2020, the nonprofit Monarch Services, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office and their allies worked to support rape and domestic violence victims and their families through additional programming.
Stopping violence at its start
Though the idea itself drew criticism, Monarch Services announced in January that it would offer a program for abusers with the mission of halting their behavior through acknowledging what causes it.
The program, called Positive Solutions, was set to launch in February or March and include eight men to put in the emotional work each Thursday for four months and up to a year. After the core curriculum, those referred to Monarch Services can continue on through another Positive Solutions program if they please. The meetings, held at an undisclosed location in mid- county, cover 12 topics, including the cycle of abuse, responsibility and accountability, childhood wounds and healthy communication.
Through checking in with the group, discussing the topic at hand and going over homework for the coming week, the ultimate goal is to break the chain of familial violence, Monarch Services program manager Leeann Luna said at the announcement.
Interim director Kalyne Foster Renda said that the organization received backlash from funding sources who don’t understand why the nonprofit would want to help the individuals who have done harm. Still, they hoped to extend the program so that it could later include women and monolingual Spanish groups alongside its evolution.
“This is a really vulnerable population,” Foster Renda said at the time. “Typically, the person who’s done harm, people that are justice- involved, are the most extremely ‘other’ group of society. And so we want to make sure that they are respected and given the opportunities that every other human has.”
The right response
Being a victim of rape that has to drive to a clinic for testing is already a tumultuous experience, but it was one made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Monarch Services communications manager Delphine Burns, fewer victims wanted to report to the “epicenter of COVID” early in the pandemic — Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, the clinic where the County of Santa Cruz had been outsourcing its testing for the last three years.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office Forensic Services Director Lauren Zephro said in September that the testing was sent out of county after maintaining on- call nurses became unrealistic. This wasn’t just a county problem, but a national one, Zephro explained. Forensic examinations such as this one — where evidence is either turned over to law enforcement for investigation or stored indefinitely until an investigation is requested — require additional training and many nurses coming in after a turnover had not gone through that training.
“We may get 20 nurses interested, but once they become introduced to the type of cases and the additional training and complexity and the different work environment, we lose the majority of them,” Zephro said a few months ago. “Part of Santa Cruz County partnering with Valley Medical Center is we were partnering with somebody who is big enough to absorb the impact of personnel challenges, which, when we had our Santa Cruz program, we were not big enough.”
A task force made up of law enforcement leaders, victim advocates and interested community members worked for a solution to bring operations back over the hill, and they found it — a Valley Medical Center satellite clinic at Dominican Hospital. A contract for personnel, including eight trained on- call sexual assault forensic examiner nurses, a nurse coordinator and a sexual assault response team program coordinator, was secured to clear the obstacle of the nursing shortage and meet victims where they are.
Considering all costs, the program is setting the county back approximately $525,000 a year, a report from Santa Cruz County Sheriff Jim Hart in February showed. All fees but the salary of the task force coordinator are split among law enforcement agency managers. The cost is offset by donations from Dominican and Watsonville Community hospitals.
While the county operations were outsourced, the Santa Cruz County Sexual Assault Response Team continued to meet. On this team are the Sheriff’s Office, each of the police departments, Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office, Monarch Services, UC Santa Cruz Campus Advocacy Resources and Education and crime laboratory representatives. Now, the team believes the clinic and the partnership with Santa Clara County Sexual Assault Response Team will be beneficial in obtaining state-of-the-art benefits and programming in the future.
“This is a really vulnerable population. Typically, the person who’s done harm, people that are justiceinvolved, are the most extremely ‘other’ group of society. And so we want to make sure that they are respected and given the opportunities that every other human has.” — Interim director Kalyne Foster Renda