At Tahirih, our highest priority is to provide survivor-centered and trauma-informed care to every person who calls us looking for help. From our very first contact with a service seeker, our processes are meant to center the whole person and focus our assistance around their expressed needs.
One of Tahirih’s core organizational values centers around ongoing transformation and growth. We understand that to provide outstanding services, we must be willing to engage in reflection, continuous learning, and strategic action. So, as Tahirih expanded from one location to five different offices across the country, our organizational growth allowed us to identify and implement best practices in each one of our offices. This expansion ultimately presented us with a strategic opportunity to gather all the lessons learned, assess and re-envision the way we wanted to organize our service delivery in a way that was more holistic and trauma informed.
This strategic review led us to adopt an interdisciplinary model of service in 2019 that enables our attorneys and our social workers to work more seamlessly together in service of our clients. Through close coordination and collaboration these interdisciplinary teams maximize their skills and expertise which enables them to present the most comprehensive analysis and options to our client to ensure the success of their legal case, help them find safety and healing, and the ability to thrive in their communities.
Based on generous input from Tahirih clients, staff, and external partners and more than a year’s worth of program planning, we are now excited to roll out a new centralized intake line and case acceptance process across all five of our offices starting this November. Through this new centralized intake line, all service seekers will be able to reach Tahirih using one number and will be able to experience the same high-quality, survivor-centered, and holistic service delivery, regardless of their location. We know that it takes a lot of courage for survivors to make the first call to ask for help, and our goal is to be timely and trauma-informed to all our callers, who may only get one chance to reach out for help.
Each survivor who calls us will speak to a highly trained client services team member, who will conduct an initial screening to determine potential eligibility for immigration relief based on the gender-based violence they may have experienced, identify safety concerns and provide safety planning support, and connect them to community resources to help meet any additional immediate needs. Resources will also be provided to every caller who faces food insecurity or homelessness, for example, regardless of whether they become a Tahirih client.
This new model will also allow us to move service seekers through our legal case acceptance process more quickly, reduce the number of times a survivor has to re-tell their story or the number of people they speak to, allowing our staff and the survivors to truly focus on building trust and psychological safety much quicker to successfully prepare for their legal case. The process will also allow survivors to connect more promptly with our dedicated social services staff to ensure we are providing wrap around support to survivors who may have just escaped domestic violence or trafficking, thus mitigating crisis and helping a client and their family stabilize.
We are excited to gather valuable input from our clients, our partners, and our staff about the success of our new centralized intake line and new case acceptance process and we are committed to implementing ongoing improvements to our services delivery guided by our values of trauma-informed, survivor-centered care to every caller.
