Contest

Resilience's Mobile Beacon Moment

If awarded with a Mobile Beacon Community Grant, how will your organization use the monetary donation?

"Without Resilience, I wouldn’t be alive today."
― former Resilience client

Every 73 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted. This public health crisis touches every demographic regardless of race, gender, orientation, community, or age. Many individuals and communities who are marginalized struggle to find effective, convenient, affordable assistance in staying safe from sexual violence and healing from its many negative effects on physical and mental health.

That’s where Resilience comes in. Last year, we impacted 30,000+ people here in the Chicago area, through our programs:

• Crisis Intervention & Medical Advocacy: supporting survivors in the emergency room and after
• Legal Advocacy: helping survivors navigate legal options
• Trauma Therapy: helping survivors heal
• Education & Training: educating people to prevent and stop sexual violence

Our programs change―and even save―lives! If we are awarded a Mobile Beacon Community Grant, the monetary donation will help us carry on with this critically important work even as we continue to struggle with the financial impact of COVID-19.

Currently, Mobile Beacon hotspots provide reliable, affordable internet access for two of our Legal & Medical Advocates who permanently work on-site in a Chicago Police Department headquarters and for three Education & Training team members who are now working from home and need backup in case of outages.

Resilience appreciates the ways that Mobile Beacon allows us to continue working, even during the most challenging time we can imagine, both for our organization and for our community. We would be thrilled and grateful to be selected for a Mobile Beacon Community Grant.

How will your organization use the 10 mobile hotspots with free internet service?

Resilience’s work in assisting sexual violence survivors and providing prevention education often takes us into locations where there is no internet service, it is unreliable, or our using it presents a burden for someone else. Public education is a critical component of mobilizing communities to take steps to prevent and stop sexual violence, to support survivors, and to help create accountability for those who have caused harm. Our Education & Training staff depends on Mobile Beacon hotspots as essential to their work. During the pandemic shutdown, we have provided three members of this team with hotspots as backup in case their Wi-Fi at home goes down. It is incredibly important to have stable, dependable internet connections as we engage in educational activities for people of all ages, from children as young as kindergarten to adults in community and professional settings.

Much of our prevention educators’ work is with students in kindergarten through 12th grade, teaching them important information about body autonomy, consent, staying safe from sexual abuse, and how to get help. A reliably clear, strong connection—via a device they can carry with them—would relieve a lot of stress for our prevention educators and allow them to focus more on students and less on technology. Even beyond our current remote setup, Mobile Beacon hotspots will help educators providing programming in the community and on-site in schools where there is often spotty or no access to a Wi-Fi connection.

In addition to being useful to our Education & Training team, as a current customer of Mobile Beacon, we have found great success in using these hotspots when providing services on-site to survivors in settings outside of our offices. One good example is the work of our Legal & Medical Advocates who work as a Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) with detectives in Chicago Police Department Area 3 Headquarters. These Legal & Medical Advocates assist survivors who choose to report to police by providing on-site support in meeting with detectives and prosecutors investigating and reviewing their case for charging.

Our Mobile Beacon hotspots are the only internet service we have access to in that location, so they are essential—and not just for the more routine work of our staff. They also help provide respite for sexual violence survivors at one of the worst moments in their lives. Their time at this office typically involves a lot of waiting, and it’s amazing how helpful and soothing it can be to pass the time by watching a movie, playing a game, or just hanging out online. This seemingly small thing is very important to the compassionate, trauma-informed care provided by our staff.

The 10 Mobile Beacon hotspots and free internet service will help us ensure that these two teams that already use hotspots are adequately covered. It will also help us incorporate new technology in ways we have not been able to before. As an organization, we are always on the move throughout the Chicago area, assisting survivors, professionals, and community members. There is not a single aspect of our work that would not be strengthened by knowing that reliable internet is always at our fingertips.

Share Your Story

In everything we do, Resilience prides ourselves on being both trauma-informed and client-focused: We are honored to follow survivors’ lead when they tell us what would most help them find comfort and healing. Here, in the words of our two MDT staff members, is the story of how Mobile Beacon hotspots help Resilience provide this support to survivors as they wait to meet with Chicago Police Department detectives and other personnel.

“Having access to the internet has helped us build rapport and provide emotional support for the survivors we see at the Area 3 Detective Division. While waiting for felony review, which can take hours, we often use streaming services like Netflix to help ease survivors’ nerves and even further develop rapport. This can be vital to a survivor’s healing by providing them a space where they can feel safe.”
— Manili Alaniz, Legal & Medical Advocate, Resilience

“I had a client who was terrified on the day of their felony review. They were quite reserved. They were too nervous for water or to use any of our fidget toys we had in the office at the time. I finally suggested we watch something on Netflix. I hopped on my account and asked them what they were interested in watching. To my surprise, they wanted to watch a horror movie. We watched almost the entire movie together before their detective came down to chat with them. At the end of the evening, they shared how much more relaxed they went into their meeting with their detective and the state’s attorney. The client, the detective and the state’s attorney all thanked me for the creative way to pass time during that stressful evening.”
— Grissel Blackmon, Senior Legal & Medical Advocate, Resilience

To further illustrate the work done by Resilience and the detectives at this Chicago Police Department office, and especially one detective with whom we work closely, Resilience created a video earlier this year, which is linked below (its file size was too large to attach). We are incredibly grateful to Mobile Beacon for the affordable, reliable internet service that allows Resilience to work in this location.

The story of Resilience’s prevention education work is best told by some of the children who have learned from it—and, in some cases, have reached out for help directly because of it. For example, we know of a boy who successfully got help in stopping sexual abuse. When the first adult he told didn’t believe him, he continued telling until he was believed and helped. This is something he learned through our prevention education programming: Students are urged to make a list of five adults they can tell, so that even if they are not believed at first, they can still find safety.

Another story came to us from a principal who let us know that two sisters who were both students at his school were able to stop ongoing sexual abuse by their stepfather because of what they had learned through Resilience. The principal knew the family well and also assumed that he would know if any student of his was being abused. However, it was only after hearing clear, accurate information about sexual abuse that one of the sisters understood what was happening and how to tell an adult. Both children immediately received help, and the abuser was brought to justice. The principal expressed that if the students had not received this prevention education programming, the abuse may have continued indefinitely.

Here, in their own words, is what some 6th through 8th graders said when asked, after a Resilience prevention education session, what they could do to prevent sexual violence and support survivors:

“Get help for anyone it is happening to and not taking part in it.”

“I would talk to that person and tell a safe adult.”

“Stand by their side.”

Receiving a Mobile Beacon Community Grant will help Resilience not only assist survivors of sexual violence, but it will also help us continue to teach both children and adults how to prevent it, stop it, and seek help for themselves and others. That is the most powerful story of all.