HAVEN reports $10k-plus embezzlement

I stayed there for about 7 weeks last July. It became clear to me before very long that the staff there cared only about securing as much grant money as possible. The shelter “advocates” provided no advocacy for the residents and were completely devoid of empathy for the women under their care. They constantly pushed their weekly group therapy meeting on residents and gave us attitude if we did not attend.The information provided in the group sessions was very basic, “how to spot abuse” type of information – appropriate for outreach, not for survivors who have already identified and escaped from abuse. I couldn’t understand at first why the shelter advocates bragged about how great the weekly group meetings were because none of them ever attended it voluntarily and I routinely witnessed staff members passing off the responsibility of leading the meeting, as if it was an unpleasant chore. This all made much more sense to me later when I learned that they get grant money for each person who attends the meeting. One would think that a shelter of this kind would want to provide beneficial information to the people they serve, but it soon became obvious that the whole point of the weekly group meetings was to milk the cash cow. They didn’t provide quality content because they didn’t care about the content. They only part that mattered to them was how many seats were filled, which naturally resulted in low attendance numbers. Instead of improving the meeting to attract more participants, they employed bullying techniques to force the residents staying there to attend. I’m quite sure their funding source won’t allow them to make attendance at these group meetings mandatory, or they would have done so long ago. And that’s just one example of the stuff I witnessed and endured while I was there.
Heartless, abusive and greedy women are in charge of HAVEN. Just ask anyone who has stayed there lately.