Shelter from the home

And one more thing, the detective added: call Clarina.

“And I was, like, ‘who’s Clarina?’”

The Clarina Howard Nichols Center in Morrisville has been quietly and efficiently helping abused women and their children for 37 years, so quietly that its shelter has remained hidden in plain sight the entire time without being moved, like that railroad platform in the Harry Potter books.

Now, perhaps, the center is working to become a little more visible in the community, while still offering that anonymous sanctuary from abusive relationships that has been its stock-in-trade since 1981.

The abused woman spoke at the center’s annual meeting last Wednesday, July 25, at the Railroad Café in Morrisville. She detailed a relationship that starting going awry shortly after moving to Vermont in 2016 — a wrecked car, a new girlfriend, $19,000 missing from the bank account — and ended with a journey through rural Vermont darkness, both literal and figurative.

“Luckily,” she said, she was an alcoholic, so she knew to seek a local support group for that. Luckily, the people at the North Central Vermont Recovery Center recognized her plight and told her just who Clarina is, or rather, what.

There is no actual Clarina, the person, not anymore; the center was named after a 19th-century woman from southern Vermont known for her reform pushes for abolition and women’s rights.

The first time the woman called the center, something clicked.

“She believed me,” she said of the person on the other end of the line. “I wasn’t even sure if I believed me.”

There wasn’t any room at the center’s shelter at the time, but all of a sudden there was a voice on the other end of the phone, a friendly female face at the front door to the center’s Main Street Morrisville office. The small organization had big arms to wrap around her, and people in all the right places.

Eventually, she got a “room at the inn.” Her estranged husband got the house and a bunch of money, which she thinks was his goal all along. She found freedom and a voice.

Last week, she was part of a three-woman panel that shared stories and thoughts about Clarina and its role within the county’s overall social safety net — the webbing includes places like the recovery center, Lamoille County Mental Health Services, Capstone Community Action, and the Lamoille Family Center.

Debbie Trombly from the family center said places like her organization and Clarina provide “concrete supports in time of need.”

Siri Rooney, the Lamoille County victim’s advocate, and a former Clarina employee who worked the stuffy, cramped third floor of the shelter, said she got “such an education, in so many ways,” from the women who would come in and out of the shelter. She said it’s frustrating to see women leave the shelter and go back to their abusive partners, but that’s the age-old reality of that cycle.

“But Clarina is so patient,” Rooney said.

Clarina by the numbers

Rooney noted that Becky Gonyea, the center’s relatively new executive director — Gonyea was hired last October, more than a year after her predecessor stepped aside — is no stranger to Clarina Howard Nichols Center. She worked there while she was still in college, more than 20 years ago.

“Becky said, ‘One day, I’m going to be running this place,’” Rooney said.

That day has arrived, and Gonyea ran down some numbers from the previous year to illustrate that Clarina once again increased its workload. According to Gonyea:

• The center served 454 people, up 37 percent from the previous year.

• It received 1,168 calls to its hotline, a 20 percent increase. The abuse survivor on the panel noted it was her habit to “call Clarina first, and then I went to the police” anytime violence crept up in her home, before her husband was finally arrested.

• The center helped people file 93 relief-from-abuse orders, up 31 percent.

• And it had, overall, 3,383 “encounters,” which can count as any interaction with someone; be it once or multiple times, each time is an encounter. That figure was up 51 percent.

Gonyea said the center did see a dip in its shelter visitors, and in the number of overall per-person “bed nights,” or sleepovers. Again, a bed night is one person spending the night.

Thirty-nine different people used the shelter, a 36 percent decrease, with 2,011 bed nights, down from 3,193. Gonyea said those decreases are largely because fewer children accompanied their parents than usual.

The numbers illustrate that Clarina’s shelter isn’t just a couple-of-night stay kind of place, and there are no limits to how long an abused person can stay there. Based on those numbers, the average person stayed at the shelter 51 nights last year, some less, some more.

“That’s a lot of work,” Gonyea said. “We’re busier than ever.”

Note: The News & Citizen/Stowe Reporter does not print information that could identify victims of domestic or sexual violence.