PENINSULA PROFILE: Woman aids victims of abuse, domestic violence

FORKS — Ann Simpson grew up all over, the daughter of an Air Force man.

So one day 30 years ago, when she was living in Pennsylvania, she decided to pack up and move to yet another part of the country. An isolated part, where she would find community, natural beauty — and a job that put her sense of compassion to work.

After arriving here, Simpson joined the state Department of Social and Health Services. That turned into 20 years in children’s services.

“I needed to take a break,” she recalled. So she quit. Took six months off.

And that, she said, “was really great.” The intentional time off gave her a rest — and led to a new opportunity. Half a decade later, Simpson says her job leading the Forks Abuse Program is still her right place.

“It goes by fast,” she said of these years.

She remembers the early Forks Abuse Program. After its founding in 1979, the agency was in what local loggers would call “skid shack,” a two-room house with lousy heat and a sloping floor. The annual budget was something like $1,170, Simpson recalled.

Today, the program, with its six staff people, is in a well-kept little house on Second Avenue. It looks like a family’s home, until a visitor walks in and sees the front room full brochures reflecting the breadth of services offered.

The Forks Abuse Program’s services are free of charge. And the variety, shown in this front room and on www.ForksAbuseProgram.org, is impressive.

There’s legal advocacy: help for the survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Staff member Sarah Warner, for example, is a legal advocate who accompanies survivors to court hearings and assists with paperwork and obtaining protective orders. There is help, too, when survivors need to talk with landlords, school officials and doctors.

For immigrants, the Forks Abuse Program crew can help with applications for the U visa, a work visa for an undocumented person who has been the victim of a crime such as domestic violence. Immigrants may not yet know their rights as survivors — their abusers may have isolated and lied to them — so a Forks Abuse Program advocate can help them start anew. The U visa leads to a legal immigration visa, which is a step on the path to legal permanent residency.

Under Simpson’s leadership, the agency reaches across the West End, seeking to not only help people who have suffered, but also work with parents and with youngsters, at Forks Middle School and the Forks Teen Center, to stop the cycles of abuse.

Among Simpson’s most enthused fans is Becca Korby, executive director of Healthy Families of Clallam County.

“We are two very small agencies,” Korby said, so “we depend a lot on each other.”

Together, Healthy Families and the Forks Abuse Program have won a $250,000 Housing First grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over three years, both offices will use the funding to help survivors move to, and stay in, permanent housing.

Domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness for women, added Korby.

Like Healthy Families does in Port Angeles, the Forks Abuse Program runs an emergency shelter for women. It is two duplexes, donated by a family more than a decade ago, and turned into four apartments. Three are for families and one is for a single woman. Between 100 and 124 women per year come to stay for an average of 40 days, Simpson said.

Korby, who is marking her 10th anniversary with Healthy Families, hailed the Forks shelter program as an excellent one, and added that the cross-county communication between agencies has had a salutary effect.

“When I first came, the Forks Abuse Program didn’t talk to Healthy Families. And there was a nonexistent relationship with Jefferson County,” and what is now Dove House Advocacy Services in Port Townsend.

“It has been wonderful to see that change,” Korby said. “We’re smarter when we’re thinking together.”

Simpson “does a lot of outreach with the tribes, which is impressive,” added Korby.

The program’s tribal liaison, Beverly Lee, reaches out to members of the Quileute, Makah and Hoh tribes. And later this month during registration, program staffers will visit Neah Bay High School to talk with students about abuse prevention.

Lee, who lived in Neah Bay for years, is a member of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations of Vancouver Island.

As the Forks Abuse Program reaches far beyond Forks — and toward prevention — there’s discussion of changing the agency’s name.

“We’ve had the name for so long,” said Simpson, that “we want to make sure we come up with something that will carry us through another 30 years; something with a positive connotation.

“We certainly welcome any suggestions,” she added.

From the day she and Simpson met, “we have been simpatico,” added Korby. It’s not that they’re one bit alike in their approaches, though.

“We laugh about that all the time. She helps balance me; I’m kind of a firecracker,” said Korby. “Ann approaches her work with a gentle, thoughtful method that I’ve learned a lot from.

“She’s so laid back. Sometimes I call her: ‘It’s been too long. I need to chill,’” Korby said.

Barney Munger, one of the Forks Abuse Program staff, is also an admirer. As manager of the Windfall thrift shop — a key revenue generator for the program — he has never been micromanaged by his boss.

Simpson is a gentle woman, a woman who above all, listens to her staff and to her clients.

“She is right there,” Munger said. “She is present.”

Munger has been running the store for four years now. People donate fine furniture and all manner of household gear.

“The place is full of good deals. I’m priced just above yard sale.

“People in Forks are super generous. Lots of people think of Windfall first” when they have a good piece of furniture to give away.

“This is the absolute best job I’ve had in my life, bar none,” said Munger.

“I’ve done a lot of things in my life . . . I like the give and take,” and the variety of people who come to donate or shop at Windfall. Many like to bargain with him, and he’s fine with that. But “if I’m getting talked down too far, I say: ‘Look, the cause is tremendous.’” Support for the Forks Abuse Program is “what you’re buying.”

For Simpson, the deep reward of this work is being there for her fellow human beings. People come to her and her staff with “very tender, intimate” wounds, she said. “Just to be there, to provide resources, is humbling. They are so humble. ‘I just need a few things.’ They’re not complaining,” but they are trying to move on.

Asked how she copes with the stresses of the job, the sadness of seeing people who have been battered and assaulted, and her demeanor stays calm. Her response, essentially, is “it’s not about me.”

The mission of the Forks Abuse Program, Simpson said, can be summed up in two words: safety and empowerment. She and her staff seek to help their clients see the way forward.

And hope does come, she said, in “watching people take steps, and get a little bit freer, every day.”