Intertribal Life Newspaper -

PAWHUSKA, Okla.-The Osage Nation Family Violence Prevention Department (ONFVPD) has been awarded the Coordinated Tribal Assistance grant from the Department of Justice for Violence Against Women for three years in the amount of $737,245.

The Osage Nation Grants Department (ONGD) successfully applied for and secured the funding to strengthen current services and efforts by the ONFVPD to address domestic violence and sexual assault in Osage County.

"This grant is a continuation of the work we have done over the past three years with the Department of Justice," said ONFVPD Director Olivia Gray, who has already spearheaded the creation of new emergency housing site and expansion of services. "The Office of Violence Against Women let me know that we were supposed to write policies for a transitional housing service. I did some research and came up with something that I thought would work for our clients without setting them up to fail. I know that coming out of a domestic violence situation, it takes a lot of time and support to put your life back together. With that in mind, we designed a service that works. That service was used more than we ever anticipated. This time we asked for a specific line item in the budget just for transitional housing in addition to our shelter."

Child Protection

ONFVPD will also hire another full-time advocate to specialize in child protection. "We have found over the past two years, when we study our numbers and our trends, that a great number of our clients have active child protection cases because of the domestic violence in their lives. We wanted to have someone on board who could help them successfully navigate that system. Living in a home with domestic violence is traumatic enough for everyone without the added stress of children being separated from their nonabusive parent because of violence in the home.