Abigail Leathe ‘11

WomenSafe Summer Internship

This past summer, I interned at WomenSafe in Middlebury. WomenSafe is a nonprofit organization that works toward the elimination of physical, sexual, and emotional violence against women and their children through direct service, education, and social change. WomenSafe provides legal and medical advocacy, emotional support, safety planning, crisis intervention, and problem solving assistance. Through community education and outreach, WomenSafe seeks to raise awareness about domestic and sexual violence.

Most of the work that I did at WomenSafe was direct service. I often met with women to discuss their options, offer emotional support, and go over problem solving and safety planning. I met women at the court house to get Relief from Abuse or Stalking and Sexual Assault Orders, and then sat with women to provide support through the hearings for these orders. I went with women to meet with a housing advocate, apply for emergency shelter at Economic Services, and go to the food shelf. I am also an EMT in Brandon, so I worked on an ongoing project to provide training to local ambulance squads, to talk to EMTs about responding to domestic violence and sexual assault calls and discuss how rescue squads and WomenSafe can work together.

Every woman that WomanSafe works with has her own unique story and is looking for different things. It can take some very creative thinking to tackle some problems, and I think I learned a lot about problem solving through my work with WomenSafe. The most rewarding part of my internship was feeling like I worked with a woman to accomplish what she was looking for and seeing her walk away feeling more confident, empowered, aware of her options and better able to provide for herself and her children. I loved forming these relationships in my direct service work and knowing that I was able to assist a woman in making a difference in her life. I also became aware of the Middlebury community in a way that I was not previously. I saw not only what problems exist for the residents of Addison County but also what resources are available to help.

Working at Womensafe was an incredibly rewarding, challenging, and thought-provoking experience. As Middlebury students, I think that domestic violence is not something that we’re confronted with every day. For me, working at WomenSafe, it was at once upsetting and eye-opening to recognize how our culture indirectly supports domestic violence, how prevalent this issue is, and although we have come so far, how much work there is left to be done. I would recommend this internship to any Middlebury student with an interest in social service, community outreach, and learning about the issues facing women and their children.