Nearly two years into the pandemic, VOICe, the Victim Outreach Intervention Center, has continued to fit its methods of outreach to the circumstances of those in need.

VOICe provides aid and assistance to individuals and families who are survivors of domestic violence, dating violence, rape, child sexual abuse, stalking, elder abuse, sexual assault and sexual harassment.

“Right now, we're fortunate that we're able to start doing stuff in person a little more,” said Maizee Zaccone, outreach and volunteer advocate at VOICe. “Early on in the pandemic, pretty much everything was virtual.

“We've started to have people be able to stay in-shelter instead of putting them in hotel rooms, but still everything is masked, and distanced. It's kind of 50/50. We still have to do some virtual stuff.”

The agency's services include crisis intervention, emergency domestic violence shelter, transitional housing, advocacy-based counseling, legal advocacy, medical advocacy, social services advocacy, support groups, children's advocacy, and community outreach and prevention.

“I think one of the things that I hear a lot is people calling us a women's shelter,” Zaccone said. “That's true, but that's only partly true.

“We really do offer shelter to anybody who is a survivor of domestic violence. We are open to any gender — we are not exclusively a women's shelter.

“A lot of men automatically feel excluded if they are a survivor of abuse because men's abuse is not talked about much at all.”

VOICe's work had to transition, like in many other cases, during the pandemic. Zaccone said the challenge lay in finding ways to engage with the whole community and letting them know about the services VOICe offers.“I know our department has been really struggling to find ways to get involved in the community again,” she said. “We're not comfortable being in large gatherings or large groups of people, and before we would be more out and about in events and talking to people directly. That has changed the most over the whole two years.”VOICe works to keep services confidential for victims and protect their privacy, and during the early part of the pandemic the organization placed clients in hotels instead of inside of the shelter in close proximity.“We have shelter advocates always on site, so they always have people there to talk to, and have safety planning,” she said. “Having that access wasn't fully available to them in the same way — they could call an advocate, but they didn't have them right there with them helping them navigate.”Now, those sheltering with VOICe are able to stay in shelter on-site again.The organization recently gathered Christmas gifts for residents, and has continued to collect donations.“We did have a couple of donation days that were canceled — we have a neutral Evans City location, and people can see different items in our wish list that we might need in-shelter. There were definitely a few times where the numbers for COVID were too high to encourage people to show up,” Zaccone said.“For the most part, a lot of our fundraising comes from online donations, and we do have funding through national coalitions as well. That wasn't affected, thankfully, during the pandemic.”

One aspect of VOICe's service that isn't always immediately obvious is its outreach in schools.Prevention education advocate Kaeleen Martin said the goal is to prevent abuse by teaching children from a young age about healthy relationships.When COVID-19 first started, Martin said, a lot of VOICe's outreach to schools was put on pause.“I have gone to a couple of schools, several schools have allowed visitors, but a lot are still not allowing outside visitors,” Martin said. “I've done some Google Classrooms, but some districts are still on standby.”Martin's lessons focus on what a healthy relationship looks like, as well as recognizing signs of abuse or unhealthy interactions.“For elementary- and middle-schoolers, I have a really simple thing, I refer to it as friendships. I'm not really talking about dating with sixth-graders,” she said. “If we model our friendships in good ways, hopefully one day we can model our relationships like that.”The lessons are scaled from a college level all the way down to 4-year-olds in preschool.“I've gone to preschools and talked about, 'Do our friends always want to hug us? No, but they're still our friends,'” she said. “We have different age-appropriate things, all from 4 years up into colleges as well. The high school program goes more into detail about abuse and what that looks like.”Martin has been part of the school outreach program for the past five years, and said students she sees in older grades often remember parts of their lessons from previous years.“Even some of the random stuff they tell me that has stuck with them, it feels like it's actually making a little impact, which is really neat to see,” she said.