Women's Center – C-VILLE Weekly

More than four years after closing its doors due to COVID-19, Region Ten’s Women’s Center still has not reopened. While the community service board cites staffing difficulties, concerned members of Interfaith Movement Promoting Action by Congregations Together (IMPACT) are frustrated with the lack of progress in reopening the facility.

Opened in 2018, the Women’s Center is a residential treatment program for women dealing with substance use. The treatment facility, alongside most of Region Ten’s in-person programming, was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

But while most Region Ten offerings have since returned to normal operations, the Women’s Center is still closed.

On May 13, IMPACT members attended the public portion of Region Ten’s monthly board meeting to emphasize the urgent need to reopen the Women’s Center.

“We cannot continue to ignore the plight of mothers, sisters, and daughters who are dying from alcoholism and addiction,” said Pastor Liz Emrey in a public comment to the Region Ten board.

Emrey’s congregation—New Beginnings Christian Community—focuses on outreach for former offenders and people dealing with substance abuse. During a closed-door portion of the board meeting, the pastor and other members of IMPACT spoke to C-VILLE in the Region Ten lobby. All expressed frustration with the lack of movement in reopening the Women’s Center.

“We started this [advocating for the reopening of the Women’s Center] because of stories we got from our congregations,” said Vikki Bravo of Congregation Beth Israel. “It’s really important to us because it’s important to our community.”

“We have been asking them for at least two years, since the pandemic ended, to reopen the women’s treatment center,” said Emrey. “They said it was a staffing problem. But how is it a staffing problem for the women’s and not for the men’s?”

In a comment via email, Region Ten Director of Community Relations and Training confirmed that staffing challenges have contributed to the continued closure of the Women’s Center.

Both the Women’s Center and Mohr Center—Region Ten’s residential substance abuse program for men—were closed due to the pandemic in 2020. But it was duration and logistics, not gender, that facilitated the Mohr Center’s prompt reopening.

“While Mohr Center staffing was negatively impacted by the pandemic, it was not at the same level as the Women’s Center, which was a newer program that had been in operation for less than two years,” said Jennings.

With the Women’s Center closed, women seeking residential substance abuse treatment have limited options in central Virginia. Region Ten currently offers programs including Project Link, Recovery Support, Intensive Outpatient Programming, and the Wellness Recovery Center for those recovering from substance abuse, but none offer the same benefits as the Women’s Center.

Uniquely, the Women’s Center allowed patients to bring up to two of their children under 5 years old with them to the residential program. Though this was a highlight of the Women’s Center when it was open, it has made reopening more challenging.

“Providing residential treatment support to young children also requires additional and specialized staffing in order to operate safely and in compliance with regulatory standards,” said Jennings. “Region Ten has worked diligently to recruit and retain qualified behavioral health staff to support the community’s needs. … The Women’s Center will reopen as appropriate and adequate staffing allows.”

Before the U.S. abolished slavery in 1865, thousands of enslaved Black Americans escaped from Southern plantations and fled to Canada, where slavery was officially banned in 1834. Many used the Underground Railroad—an extensive network of secret routes, safe houses, free and enslaved Black Americans, and white abolitionists—to make the dangerous journey to freedom. The former slaves settled in free Black communities across southern Canada.

For years, feminist writer and cultural critic Mikki Kendall believed that her great-grandfather was a descendant of the enslaved Black people who fled to Canada. Her family assumed he eventually immigrated to the United States, where he met her great-grandmother. But when Kendall went looking for her great-grandfather’s name in Canadian records in 2020, she came up empty.

“My grandmother’s father has always been a little bit of a family mystery,” says Kendall, author of New York Times bestseller Hood Feminism and Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights. “They changed their last name at some point…There were two different spellings of the name, and three different stories about where he was from.”

After spending months scouring ancestry.com for records of her great-grandfather, Kendall finally stumbled upon records of his sibling and father. She was surprised to discover that his family was not from the country of Canada, but rather Canada, Virginia—a free Black community near the University of Virginia.

Residents of Canada worked as “washerwomen, seamstresses, carpenters, and cobblers, mostly serving students and faculty,” reports the Virginia Humanities’ Encyclopedia Virginia.

Notable residents of Canada include Catherine “Kitty” Foster, who was freed from slavery in 1820 and bought two acres of land in Canada, near several other free Black households, in 1833. Foster passed her land on to her descendants, who continued to live there until 1906, before the community was destroyed. In the 1990s and 2000s, archeologists discovered 32 unmarked graves—including Foster’s—where the neighborhood used to be. A memorial to Foster, showing the outline of her house, now stands next to the cemetery on UVA’s South Lawn.

“My family is up in Chicago on both my grandmother and grandfather’s side because of massacres and towns being destroyed,” says Kendall. “So [learning about Canada] wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it was like, ‘Oh damn. Not one of you escaped this history.’”

Next week, Kendall will take a (virtual) trip to her great-grandfather’s hometown, when she speaks at the UVA’s Women’s Center about her feminist work. For over a decade, her work has critiqued modern white feminism, attempting to shed an intersectional light on issues faced by Black women and other women of color. She has coined several viral hashtags on Twitter, including #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which called out white feminists who defended Hugo Schwyzer, a former college professor who preyed upon young women of color.

“It was weird seeing what was supposed to be feminism centered on men,” she says. “I wanted the conversation to be about needs and not lipstick and last names.”

In Hood Feminism, Kendall’s most recent book, she argues that basic human needs—including food, health care, safe neighborhoods, and a living wage—are feminist issues too, drawing on her own personal experiences.

“[The book] highlights the ways that a lot of communities have the same problems, except the way that they’re discussed are different,” she adds. “Missing and murdered Indigenous women and missing and murdered Black girls—this is the same problem.”

At UVA, Kendall also plans to discuss the “unacknowledged work” of women, disabled individuals, and genderqueer folk within feminist movements.

“We only talk Rosa Parks in the context of the bus, and never talk about her work to protect women from sexual violence,” says Kendall. “Movements honestly work better when we acknowledge the work being done.”

Kendall is currently working on a book about her family’s genealogy, as well as the construct of America. And when it is safe to do so, she plans to make an in-person visit to the former site of Canada.

Mikki Kendall will speak at the UVA Women’s Center on January 19 at 5 pm.