Thumbnail photo: Courtesy of the North Coast Rape Crisis Team
Amanda LeBlanc issued a call to action last week.
Appearing before the Del Norte County Board of Supervisors, the executive director of the North Coast Rape Crisis Team accepted a proclamation declaring April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month. But with a $500,000 grant that pays for five sexual-assault response team nurses in Del Norte County at the mercy of the Trump administration’s federal funding freeze, LeBlanc urged local elected officials and other Del Norters to reach out to their state and national representatives.
“We’ve been told by our lobbying agencies that they are really sick of hearing from us because they understand that we like our jobs and we would like the funding,” she said. “We need to hear from people in our community who are not directly affected by these funds.”
The North Coast Rape Crisis Team was one of two organizations in the United States to receive funding from the U.S. Office on Violence Against Women’s Rural Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner grant program.
The three-year $500,000 grant will provide on-call stipends for sexual assault response team nurses and pay for forensic interview training for the Crescent City Police Det. Ethan Miller and Jennifer Williamson, pretrial coordinator for Del Norte County District Attorney’s Office. The grant will also allow the NCRCT to turn its Crescent City office into a safe place for sexual assault survivors, especially children, to tell their truth “in one fell swoop,” LeBlanc told Redwood Voice Community News on Wednesday.
“The more times you ask them what happens is their answers get shorter and they believe — and this is part of brain development in children — the more questions you ask them, especially if you keep asking them the same ones over and over again, they think you don’t believe them,” she said. “Consistency is super important. A multidisciplinary team can come together and child welfare can get questions answered about the case, law enforcement can get questions answered, the DA can get questions answered.”
Since being notified of its grant in November, the only funding the Rape Crisis Team received so far has paid for training and an orientation for LeBlanc and the organization’s finance director. This was in December. A month later, President Donald Trump occupied the White House and issued an executive order freezing trillions of dollars in federal grants, loans and other financial support.
Trump’s order also stood to impact Victims of Crime Act money the North Coast Rape Crisis Team receives via the California Office of Emergency Services, or CalOES, LeBlanc said. Federal dollars account for 97 percent of the Rape Crisis Team’s budget, she estimated.
“When the order came through we were like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’” she said. “There is now an injunction that allows our funds to come to us — so I can do federal drawdowns from OVW and CalOES is paying our invoices right now — but it is against all grant rules and audit rules for us to bill for more than we are spending.”
Nonprofits are a cash flow nightmare at the best of times. Each invoice the North Coast Rape Crisis Team sends to state and federal funding agencies must go through an audit before it’s paid, a process that normally takes 30 to 45 days, LeBlanc said.
OVW, however, asks its grant recipients to bill quarterly, LeBlanc said, while her staff, including the SART nurses, expect to be paid every two weeks “just like everybody else.” However, she said, the Rape Crisis Team can’t triple its billing to prepare for the possibility that it can’t drawdown its grant dollars in the near future.
“We will continue to draw down and do business as long as we can, but if there is a funding freeze on federal grants for sexualized violence and Victims of Crime, we will shut down,” she said. “I have what’s in my bank account and that’s it.”
The federal funding freeze also impacts future grant applications, LeBlanc said. The Rape Crisis Team had applied for three more OVW grants and those applications have been rescinded.
Two federal judges have issued preliminary injunctions to block the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze federal grants and other Congressionally-approved government programs. The second preliminary injunction came in March from U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island who, NPR reported, said “the Executive put itself above Congress.”
McConnell issued his decision after Democratic attorneys general from 22 states, including California, and Washington D.C. sued the Trump administration.
However, on April 4, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a Trump administration freeze on $65 million in grants for teacher training and professional development to continue. Following this decision, lawyers for the Trump administration returned to McConnell arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision vindicated their position in the federal funding freeze case and asked that the preliminary injunction be lifted, Newsweek reported on Monday. The plaintiff states opposed that motion.
Back on the North Coast, LeBlanc said her organization has worked with 900 survivors across Humboldt and Del Norte counties and its hotline has taken more than 4,000 crisis calls.
In addition to receiving federal funding to build up Del Norte’s capacity to respond to sexual assault cases, those dollars pay for sexual assault response counselors who are required by state law to attend every law enforcement interview and forensic medical exam, LeBlanc said.
“If we were to shut down, without help from California or other places, the law would be broken every time a survivor came forward,” she said. “That’s the person who maintains their rights, who ensures that they are treated humanely within a process that is inhumane to survivors. We’re required for a reason.”
LeBlanc, again, urged people to go to the North Coast Rape Crisis Team website where there are scripts people can use to encourage lawmakers to fight for the funding her organization relies on.
“A Rape Crisis Center not existing does not mean that sexual assault doesn’t happen,” she said. “What it means is that healing doesn’t happen and when healing doesn’t happen we have a lot of people in this world who are out harming others and continuing the cycles of violence.”
