Seven Dancers Coalition Receive Large Grant to Better Serve Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Victims

Amie Barnes, Executive Director, announced the Seven Dancers Coalition (formerly Haudenosaunee Coalition for Women's Empowerment) recently received $369,000 grant from the Office of Violence Against Women. This grant will allow the Seven Dancers Coalition to serve a larger population of Native American victims of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault throughout Native American Communities within New York State. Their first year was spent building awareness of violence against Native women and addressing the trauma. As well, the Coalition serves a number of goals and objectives; including prevention and education, central to this is providing a "victim centered approach" which simply means not blaming the victim; educating and targeting youth to build resilience and understanding of a healthy relationships through awareness and prevention; and providing caretakers and service providers with training and healing that ensure longevity and strength in the healing of our Native women and families. Generally, care and service providers start to feel the effects of "burn out" just after a year of work in this field, so it is vital to provide support to these dedicated people.

Part of reaching this goal is to educate local and regional law enforcement to provide better response to Native women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. This grant allows greater expansion of training and technical support to all native law enforcement agencies in New York State including court personnel, judges, and prosecutors.

Just as important, the Seven Dancers Coalition will now be able to provide expanded services to Tuscarora, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca Nations as well as Native American Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault programs across New York State.

Executive Director, Amie Barnes stated she was very pleased with the amount of the grant, she had originally applied for and received $290,000 and then was given additional funds by the United States Department of Justice, Office of Violence Against Women. The mission of OVW is to provide federal leadership in the Nation's capacity to reduce violence against women and to strengthen services to victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking.

"The Seven Dancers Coalition's Program target population is teens and older but we strongly feel that to change attitudes, behavior, and a way of thinking is to start at a very young age. We want our young men and women to have healthy attitudes about relationships and behavior, and for all women, young and old, to live in a world without fear of violence. This grant will put us out there to do the work we need to do to make Akwesasne and other communities a violence free community," said Amie Barnes.