Program areas at TCFV
While tcfv continues to deliver its service programs with adjustments for covid-19, there has been significant impact on tcfv's traditional business model of how we deploy our program services. Tcfv's travel, in-person technical assistance conference events (internally and externally) and other in person meetings. Henceforward, tcfv will have to continue to augment our service model, with expanding our virtual platforms, not only to accommodate the communities we serve, but also our existing organizational systems to be more efficient and nimbler. The Texas Council on Family Violence executes in mission through three primary objectives: support to service providers - deep, thorough and impactful training, technical assistance and capacity building at the local level to ensure an access point for a survivor and their children seeking safety and support is viable and available. This objective also works with offender services with the recognition it is essential to work both ends of a spectrum to truly amplify safety. This work includes board, executive and finance professional training, equipping front line staff with best and promising practices, and strengthening a coordinated community response inclusive of other systems. Policy - focus on statutory and regulatory policy to affect systems change; this includes the civil, criminal, child welfare, healthcare and administrative policy. The agency leads, commissions or collaborates on extensive research to propel change to policy, practice and training. Prevention - builds capacity of prevention educators through various forums and engages a youth advisory board to create and propel strategic prevention initiatives in confronting the conditions that allow Violence to occur. It is important to highlight the complexities of this year. Covid brought unprecedented challenges to the organization. Tcfv is an agency tethered in in-person training and fostering various forums of learning and information sharing. Tcfv quickly had to redefine mechanisms to deliver our programs and expertise utilizing other mediums. Additionally, our own internal infrastructure was not entirely conducive to remote work. It created expense we had not budgeted and further illuminated the rent space cost of over $270,000 for space that went unutilized for 9 months of the calendar year and continued to cy21. The health and safety of our employees, while simultaneously serving our mission, became a complex situation requiring a myriad of solutions. Simultaneously the community-based organizations who rely on our expertise, caused us to quickly ramp up our expertise in areas new to us - social distancing in emergency shelters, government funder requirements, cdc and public health department protocols, for example. In addition, domestic Violence incidents across the state increased. In fact, comparing data 6 months before covid to 6 months into covid, domestic Violence calls to law enforcement increased by 6%. More importantly calls involving a firearm increased by 42%, this clearly underscore the increase in frequency and severity of Violence. This lands squarely on the work of this organization. Additionally, our nation was confronted with acknowledging inequities to people of color. Tcfv prioritized looking at internal systems and structures, as well as public facing work through a racial equity lens.