For four years, Silver Linings women’s shelter has been taking in women in crisis and giving them a foundation to lift themselves back up.
The staff and volunteers make referrals to drug treatment centers for women battling addiction. They help women secure housing and jobs. They set up health insurance for them and find Social Security cards.
On the fourth anniversary of the day the home was first rented, papers were signed to buy it.
Now, the shelter needs the community’s help to raise $43,000 to pay for materials for building an addition.
Habitat for Humanity is coordinating the build and wants to start by the end of June.
Jim Drum, who is co-coordinator of construction with Bill Walters, said the plan is to have the addition done by the end of September, which is also National Recovery Month.
The project includes enclosing the home’s carport to make two more bedrooms, a laundry room and a new bathroom. It will require insulation and plumbing.
Windows also will be replaced to aid in energy efficiency, and a new deck will be built.
The additional bedrooms to be built will be used for short-term, 72-hour stays. Women can stay at the shelter for as long as it takes to secure a stable job and a place to live.
The work inside
Silver Linings “house mom” Jane Parker stands in the kitchen making a pot of soup for lunch as Director Carrie Foley sits at the table.
The Serenity Prayer hangs on the wall nearby: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference,” it begins.
“We never held out that we were a treatment facility. It’s what we do, it’s part of what we do, and frankly, it’s like 90 percent of what we do. But the fact of the matter is we are a sober living community,” Foley said.
Foley estimated that 90 percent of the residents in the home battle addictions, and about 50 percent of them are dealing with opioid addictions.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that they would be currently using, but they may be coming in from treatment, transitioning from treatment,” she said.
Foley said the majority of the women are in their 20s and 30s, but the shelter has served women as young as 18.
Parker, 58, lives in the home along with five other residents. The shelter has six official beds and just one bathroom.
“We really have not had any serious injuries over use of the bathroom,” Foley said with a laugh.
Parker is the first resident to have lived at Silver Linings.
She is recovering from an addiction to alcohol. She serves as a peer recovery supporter. “I know the population. I am one of them,” she said. “I am with my own kind, basically.”
After leaving the local shelter, she lived at the Amethyst House in Bloomington for six months and began working for Bloomingfoods. Then, Foley asked her to return to Silver Linings to be the house manager.
“I was having a hard time finding housing again. I’m a veteran, so I had a Section 8 voucher, which I lost because I was making too much money,” she said. “I thought, all I am doing really is going to work, going home and having some kind of live meeting as a sponsor. … I thought, what the heck? I’m not doing anything really with my life.”
The majority of women who show up at the shelter have been victims of trauma, are homeless, are addicted to drugs, or they are battling all three.
“A piece of this pie is trauma. It’s domestic violence, but it’s not just domestic violence,” Foley said.
“For example, we have some residents who have really, really severe trauma histories as even young children. They wind up here.”
Others are placed at the shelter by the Department of Child Services when they cannot live in the same home as their children. Supervised visits between mothers and children also happen at the shelter.
Sometimes, women are sentenced by Brown Circuit Court to stay at Silver Linings on house arrest. Other women may show up at the shelter after they leave the jail with no place to go.
Parker, Foley and a network of volunteers help them transition into a “normal” life.
“You need a routine. You need to learn how to take care of yourself physically, then put things in order in your life. Job: Where are is all of your paperwork? Where is your Social Security card? All of those little tiny things people have scattered all around, just trying to find all of that and getting all of that,” Parker said.
Women don’t have to be shelter residents to receive case management services, like treatment referrals or help getting housing, Foley said.
“They don’t have to have any intention of coming here in order to get help getting treatment. We try to make those referrals,” she said.
The shelter also hosts a Monday night general recovery meeting for women that’s open to the public. A lot of former shelter residents also attend.
“At least half of our volunteers come from our past residents. We are so lucky that the success stories that we can share,” Foley said.
“This is a growing and developing recovery community in Brown County. The opiate crisis has brought it about, but it was already on its way. Now there is a recovery community that is not reluctant to step in and do outreach things.”
One of those success stories is 55-year-old Ruthie. She was living at the shelter in February, but now lives on her own in an apartment.
Ruthie was homeless and couch-surfing for about six months when she arrived at Silver Linings in October.
“Gosh, I don’t know what kind of words for me to say. I am thankful it was here. I am thankful that this can be a restart for me in several different ways,” she said.
“This place (Brown County) has a lot to offer if you pay attention. I didn’t know I could even go back to school. There’s a chance I could try to get an associate’s degree while I’m here. … There’s a lot here. There’s a lot more meetings in town. There’s more blessings in this town than I thought there were.”
Ruthie said she wishes there were more people who cared like Foley.
“I hate when somebody says, ‘Oh, that kid is just a drug head. Stay away from him.’ No, you need to give that kid a hug and say, ‘I love you.’ That’s a big piece of me. If these people would just pay attention and give that kid a hug,” Ruthie said. “These people just don’t know. These kids are dying and they need a hug.”
Still more to do
Shelter residents are drug tested, but a positive drug test doesn’t mean they are out and back on the streets.
“If we are looking at this as a relapsing illness, that they deserve another chance, (if) we put them out on the street where they will surely use again, then we kind of are responsible for it too. However, it puts us in a bind for everybody here who is working hard at recovery and the people who aren’t in recovery,” Foley said.
Because of that, Foley said the staff is constantly re-evaluating how to do deal with residents who test positive for drugs.
“Frankly, there are times when it’s a judgment call and we kind of need to agree. The staff agrees, all of our staff and volunteers, we talk about what are we going to do about this issue? Sometimes we put it up for vote with other house residents. … Sometimes people will have a lot of advocates already in our community saying, ‘It’s OK. Let’s give them another chance.’”
“When you get down to six or eight chances, you’re beginning to stretch things.”
Parker said sometimes women come to the shelter whose parents “think we can fix them.”
“(They think) we’re going to be able to do everything that they couldn’t do when they were teenagers, and as they’re going through incarceration or DCS or divorce, when they come here it’s going to be (all better). It’s not. It’s hard,” she said.
When residents have jobs and are able to help, they contribute to paying bills or other expenses associated with living in the shelter.
“It helps us to get people into jobs that are paid better. Our standards are we want to see people in a stable job, they need to be working and that means they’ve got to learn employment skills,” Foley said.
“Although most of them don’t have to learn; they already have them. They just need to be able to be in a fixed place, a stable place where they can get to work every day.”
Staff encourage residents to use the Brown County Career Resource Center to get further credentialing, like as an electrician or certified nursing assistant.
But for women with children who are trying to find a job, finding childcare is an obstacle. “We do need to solve the childcare problem in Brown County,” Foley said.
Former residents who are in a “secure place in recovery” can come back to serve as resident assistants.
“Just like colleges have an RA at the dorm, (having) somebody to go to, somebody who has been through there, can help people with just everyday things,” Foley said.
It also helps those former residents who are trying to better their life by having the RA title at the shelter.
“I tell you, when I go to court and I say, ‘So-and-so is a residential assistant,’ I know that counts with the court, probation and with DCS, because it’s our recognition that they are really beginning to be much more secure in their recovery,” Foley said.
Foley said there are always several women on the shelter’s wait list.
Referrals come from the recovery community and other agencies in the county, like St. Vincent de Paul. But some of those referrals are for homeless men, which the shelter cannot serve.
“We try to help where we can, but we need a men’s shelter. There is no way around that and there’s not very much support for it,” she said.
When a neighbor in the women’s shelter’s neighborhood was told the shelter would be opening, she said she was going to put her home up for sale when she thought the shelter was serving men, Foley said.
“We’ve been really lucky we’ve not had any major incidents here. The police will occasionally come to serve a warrant for somebody who is maybe not even here. We have not had a single event at the shelter that has required police assistance to break up a fight or for any other reason except for protection,” Foley said.
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HOW TO HELP
Silver Linings women’s shelter has been searching for an ongoing fundraiser, and now it has one: The Dragonfly Gallery on East Washington Street.
By the end of June, the women’s shelter needs to raise $43,000 to fund materials for an addition at the shelter that will make two additional bedrooms, one bathroom and a new laundry room.
Selling jewelry, other arts and crafts and home decor items at the gallery is one way the shelter is trying to raise money to help with those costs.
Silver Linings also has an application in for the Brown County Community Foundation’s annual competitive grant cycle — along with 29 other nonprofits.
Any monetary donations for the project can be given to the Women’s Resource Center fund at the Brown County Community Foundation, Silver Linings Director Carrie Foley said.
ABOUT THE GALLERY
Currently, the Dragonfly Gallery has six consigners who sell handcrafted items there. The gallery also sells donated handcrafted and vintage goods.
Anyone who wishes to donate items to the Dragonfly Gallery can do so by calling Foley at 812-320-1201.
“They (consigners) get 60 percent and we keep 40 percent. We kind of modeled it on the (Brown County) Craft Gallery because the consignment fees you collect, you can pay off your expenses, then whatever is left over (is ours),” Foley said.
Foley makes jewelry which she sells at the Dragonfly.
Women’s shelter residents and volunteers also work in the gallery. “It’s an all-volunteer enterprise,” Foley said.
The name Dragonfly was picked because it represents an element of change, she said.
After Memorial Day weekend, the Dragonfly Gallery will merge with the Brown County Craft Gallery, which is moving from its Main Street location to the Dragonfly’s East Washington Street building. The Dragonfly will then become a consigner at the Craft Gallery.
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