Spotlight on Shelter: A Day at SafeHouse

Reprinted with permission from SafeHouse.org.

Key Takeaways:

1. Shelter life is unpredictable but built on care. Every day brings crises, laughter and community, and staff “make it happen” no matter what arises.
2. Healing is a process, not a straight line. Survivors may leave and return multiple times, but each return is a step toward safety, not a failure.
3. Safety and hope are rebuilt together. Shelter works because of collective effort—staff, residents, volunteers and community supporters all play a role in creating space for healing.

What does safety look like? For many, it’s a locked door, a safety plan, a familiar routine. For survivors of domestic violence, safety is often hard-won—and sometimes it begins in a place they never expected to be.

As prevention educator at SafeHouse, a domestic violence advocacy organization and shelter in central Alabama, I spend most of my time in the community—teaching, listening, and working to stop violence before it starts. But recently, I spent a full day at our domestic violence shelter (note: we also serve victims of sexual violence), stepping into a different side of the work. I spoke with staff and residents, observed the rhythms of daily life, and witnessed the power of a space built entirely around healing and safety.

This is a glimpse into that day.

Note: While I’m using the staff’s real names with their permission, I will never give a client’s true name or true initials. Identifying details have also been changed to protect their confidentiality.

8:30 – 9:30 AM: The Day Begins

I arrive at Shelter at 8:30 in the morning. All is quiet. Most of the clients are still asleep, although a few are milling about, scrounging up some breakfast, or sitting outside on the patio, soaking up the morning sun, and getting ready for the day. In the office, the case managers Lena Tudor and Christal Lagrone and Shelter director Tabranecia Patterson are taking advantage of the quiet to work at their desks—a luxury they aren’t often afforded during the typical daily chaos. I sit down at the table in the conference room, a multi-purpose room where staff work, talk, put out fires, eat, meet, advise, calm, organize donations, and snatch moments to answer emails and squeeze in their administrative tasks.

When I later ask what a typical day looks like, Lena explains that while everyone on staff has specific responsibilities, they all share the basic activities of an advocate. They’ll trade off answering the phones and responding to clients’ needs.

“There’s a lot of stuff around here that we all just sort of pitch in to do. Every Wednesday we have groceries. Usually Kathleen [Kathleen Rogers, the Child and Family Advocate] picks those up. Throughout the week we’ll have transportation requests for clients that we’ll go on.”

Staff must keep their records updated, maintain good data, and consistently deal with problems that arise, from interpersonal conflicts to a lack of resources. But I find that it’s hard for Lena and Kathleen to describe a “typical” day, because there is almost no such thing at Shelter.

“We dug through trash the other day because we had reports of clients bringing alcohol into Shelter, and we went out to the dumpster,” says Lena.

“Tabatha and I changed a tire yesterday,” adds Kathleen. “So that was fun. You very rarely can actually plan something here.”

Lena continues, “I know there’s a lot of pressure to have stuff ready on the back end. But a lot of things just happen. It’s more reactive than someone who is not used to it would appreciate.”

I’m about to see the truth of this statement as the day unfolds.

9:30 – 10:30 AM: A New Face

At 9:30 am, the quiet begins to ebb away as families stir, residents make their way downstairs or head out to jobs, and kid noises reverberate through the hallways. A police cruiser pulls up to the front door and a brand-new client stumbles, exhausted, out of the back seat. Her shoulders are slumped. She hasn’t slept all night. We don’t know her story, but the fear and pain are written on her face. Tabranecia greets her, as she tries to do for every client. There is an intake to get through—an intense process during which the staff collect the client’s background information and the full story of the abuse she has endured. But the staff consider the client’s needs first. This client needs a shower, a long nap, and a meal in that order. She probably also needs a private moment to have a good cry.

The new arrival is quickly set up with a room and a bed. Staff help her make up her bed, find clean clothes, and hand her a neatly bundled stack of towels—her own personal set of bath and hand towels and a washcloth, tied together in a welcome pack. It’s part of a system created by Kathleen, the Child and Family Advocate. 

Kathleen is a planner. “I came in [to SafeHouse] ready to have a schedule and a plan,” she tells me, “and it doesn’t—I mean, you can plan things. You just have to know your plan has to be flexible.”

Kathleen has built systems that bring order to the chaos, like the towel packs—small touches that ensure consistency even on the busiest, most unpredictable days. A system, she says, will work whether you have time to plan or not.

The new client’s roommate, another resident, offers her snacks and any other help she might need. There’s a real family atmosphere here. Coming to a shelter can be scary—and the makeup of the cohort directly impacts the overall “vibe” at any given time, staff tell me. Sometimes the vibe is good. Sometimes it’s not so good. But what I’m seeing right now is kindness: women navigating an impossible situation and doing their best to care for each other.

10:30 AM – 12:30 PM: “Making It Happen”

At 10:30 am, Kathleen arrives with a car trunk full of clothing donations. The quiet conference room becomes a donation processing station. We empty the dozen trash bags and sort clothes based on size and the storage categories the staff have set up in one of the closets. 

Kathleen knows the clients well. Sometimes she’ll pick up an item and set it aside to offer it to one specific client first. “LM will love this,” she says to herself, handling a colorful skirt. When staff speak to the clients they use their names. But when speaking about the clients to each other, they use their initials as a way of protecting their confidentiality.

Getting through a task like this is a hands-on affair—meaning anybody who has hands available hops in and out of the sorting when they can. I learn quickly there are always a dozen things going on at Shelter. Someone—usually Residential Director Tabranecia Patterson or Operations Coordinator Tabatha Hunt—is always on the phone trying to arrange a meeting, resources, or volunteer assistance.

“Tabranecia is amazing at multi-tasking,” says Kathleen. “She can help people while simultaneously taking information for a crisis call. I don’t know how she does it.”

By now many of the Shelter clients are up and getting on with their days. Clients drift in and out of the conference room, stopping in to ask questions or offer help.

“I can make dinner tonight.”

“I have a doctor’s appointment next week, and I’ll need a ride.”

“I told the new girl I’d move beds so she could have the one with the outlet for her CPAP.”

Survivors are the primary clients at SafeHouse. But children are secondary clients and are important here, too. For some children, Shelter is the first place they’ve felt safe in a long time. It’s obvious from their interactions that staff have made them feel loved and at home. Kathleen can quiet a crying baby when she takes over while mom goes to a therapy appointment. And all the staff accept hugs and answer a million questions a day from a dozen curious children who are all delighted to have the ear of a cohort of adults who care. It’s loud, boisterous. It’s wonderful. And it’s hard.

“There’s a spirit of ‘making it happen,’” Lena says. “Especially when we don’t have the resources, or we can’t put our hands on something right now.”

We return to this idea of “the spirit of making it happen” many times over the course of the day. Later Lena tells me, “I know that if I have too much going on, I can ask someone, ‘Hey, could you do this one thing for me that would lighten my load? … And that doesn’t fail. Somebody will come through. And if they can’t, somebody will hype me up so that I can get it done anyway. … It really does feel like the ‘make it happen’ spirit.”

12:30 – 1:30 PM: A Place of Reckoning

Some of the staff make time in their busy schedules to sit down and answer the questions I have about their days at Shelter. I want to know what they find most rewarding about the work. Kathleen has a ready answer: “I love when clients get to leave Shelter happily and then call us afterwards. … Because a lot of times they leave Shelter to go back to their abusers and we don’t want that for them.”

“We know it’s normal,” explains Lena. “But it’s hard.”

It is normal for survivors to return to their abusers—sometimes more than once. In fact, many say  that it takes an average of five to seven attempts to leave a relationship with an abuser for good. Survivors go back for many reasons: financial dependence, housing insecurity, fear of retaliation, concern for their children, or simply because the person they love is also the person who hurt them. Shelter staff understand this deeply. Instead of judgment, they offer welcome.

“We love when they come back,” Kathleen tells me. “We welcome them.”

When a survivor returns to Shelter, it’s not a failure—it’s a continuation of the process. Healing is rarely linear, and safety doesn’t always arrive on the first attempt. Each time someone comes back through our doors, it’s a chance to try again, to regroup, and to choose themselves. But even after someone has left the abuser for good, the hardest part is often still ahead. Lena put it this way:

“There are two paths. The hardest part—besides the life-threatening situation in the moment of your abuse—is when you’re first out of it. You’re experiencing grief, anger, regret. Maybe you’re still in love with the person. Maybe you want to go no-contact, but you can’t because you have children, or you’re trying to wrap up your divorce situation. Either way you have probably learned some maladaptive coping mechanisms. 

And then you get here, and you have people who are telling you, ‘This is the way we handle this.’ You come here, and suddenly you’ve gone from living privately to living communally. So, everyone comes here and has a rough adjustment period.

“The paths diverge between the people who can roll with that. [Some people] can look at their situation and [see] the things they have to unlearn. Others aren’t ready to let go of those [maladaptive] behaviors or a certain mindset. So, people either change for the better or for the worse, because this is very much a place of reckoning. Once you get out of that situation, the hard part is dealing with it. [You ask], ‘Am I safe?’

[You tell yourself] ‘I’m safe.’

‘But, am I safe?’

‘What can I carry forward with me?’

‘What do I need to leave behind?’

‘Am I capable of that?’

“Some people are not, and that’s ok. I hate that it happens. But I’m not going to criticize them. Because what happened to them should never have happened to them. They were given something they never should have had to carry.”

That reckoning doesn’t just happen for survivors—it happens for staff, too. Working in Shelter means being face-to-face with the weight of what people carry and the patterns that brought them here. Case manager Christal Lagrone shares how, even with an open mind, she wasn’t prepared for just how widespread and deeply rooted abuse can be:

“They have a lot of the same ways about themselves, abusers do. It’s surprising to me that so many [abusers] have these same traits. That people don’t treat other people with respect like they should and put other people in danger like that. And the way they go about it—isolating [victims] from their lives outside of [the abuser, for example]. … I feel like I shouldn’t have been surprised going into it, but you just wouldn’t think that there are that many people out there who want to harm others. But there are. I don’t think I was being naive coming into it, but I wasn’t really understanding how deep it goes.

As she shares this, staff members quietly nod in agreement while checking the time—it’s already after 1 pm and no one has eaten yet. The deep conversations are layered over the daily reality: phones ringing, doors buzzing, and a clock that never seems to slow down. Even on the rare slow days, lunch often happens in pieces—if it happens at all: a bite here, a few sips of coffee there, in between answering calls or helping a new resident get settled.

“You’re driven crazy by it, on one hand,” says Lena. “But on the other hand, we’re addicted to it.”

Tabranecia hears this as she enters the conference room and laughs, “We are addicted to it,” she says. “We hear comments from all of you [back at the community office] saying things like, ‘there’s always something going on at Shelter.’ Yes. There is!”

Staff chime in from around the room, “There is!”

“That’s the nature of the beast,” Tabranecia continues. “Domestic violence is complex. We’re not getting individuals who have just been through a DV situation. We’re getting individuals who’ve been through a DV situation who also have substance abuse [issues]. Who have mental health [issues]. Who have [generational] family trauma. We’re dealing with different things.”

“Plus our own trauma,” Lena adds. “Because a lot of [staff] are survivors too.”

Shelter staff hold space for crisis and healing, for survival and hope, often while juggling their own stories and their own wounds. The work is relentless. It’s also sacred. “There’s always something going on at Shelter,” they say—and it’s true. What’s also true is that the staff keep showing up, every day, for the people who need them most. People like Marco.

“When I Come Here, I Take a Deep Breath.”

Marco’s days at Shelter follow a familiar rhythm—work, chores, dinner, and the comfort of a quiet routine. “The worst time for me is night,” he tells me. “I hate being alone. But through the counseling sessions here, I’ve learned to enjoy that time.” He reads a lot these days. He’s working on coping skills. He’s making room for stillness.

Marco is one of the few male residents currently staying at SafeHouse. Domestic violence affects people of all genders, but men are far less likely to seek help or find space in shelter programs. Marco knows that. “So many people have turned me away because they see a male and domestic violence, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, right.’ But I was received here with open arms.”

He talks about the healing that happens over shared meals and card games, the steady transformation of pain into self-reflection. “Dinner is my favorite time,” he says with a smile. “We play Uno or dominoes with some of the other residents and their kids. It gets pretty intense. But it gets our minds off things.”

Marco didn’t arrive at SafeHouse seeking a fresh start—he arrived seeking survival. Chronic stress had been eating away at his body, aggravating serious health conditions and threatening his peace of mind. “I told my therapist, ‘I’d rather not be [at home] than have my son watch [my abuser] belittle me.’” It’s clear that so much of what grounds him here isn’t just the programming, but the perspective he’s gained. “This place is like a construction zone,” he says. “You’re chipping and chopping away.” It’s all about ripping the band-aid off the wound so it can actually heal.

But that healing isn’t instant. “You have to be willing to do the work,” he tells me. “At first it’s really hard. But this place gives you tools.” It gives you the space to figure out who you are again. He recalls a counseling session where counselor Nikoyah Dunn quoted The Lion King. “‘Who are you?’ Mufasa asks Simba. I’m allowed to ask that here, too—and be myself without fear of rejection.”

What Marco wishes others knew about domestic violence is that it doesn’t have a single face. Survivors come from every walk of life. He speaks candidly about the shame, the misconceptions, and the cultural messages that kept him in the relationship far longer than he now believes was safe. “I had my blinders on,” he says. “But it kept getting worse and worse. … When I finally saw the intake sheet—when I saw all the kinds of abuse listed out and realized they all applied to me—I just cried.”

He pauses. “When I come here, I take a deep breath. I’m okay. I’m here. SafeHouse has been a blessing.”

1:30 – 3:30 PM: A Trip in the Magic School Bus

At 1:30 pm, the staff have a meeting with an organization that offers parenting classes and support for parents with children up to five years old. The staff are always on the lookout for resources they can bring to their clients, aiming to make their time at the shelter both helpful and goal oriented. Since this meeting would benefit all the staff, I offer to drive one of the clients—Lani—to her therapy appointment.

We clamber into the large white van the staff have nicknamed The Magic School Bus. I don’t often drive large vehicles, so at first, I’m very focused on the road. “I’m going to drive like a grandma,” I warn Lani to set her expectations. But once I get the hang of the Magic School Bus, we start chatting. Lani opens up about her life and what she’s been through.

She is finally free from her abuser. Though she tried to leave many times before, this time feels different. “He almost killed me last time—he strangled me,” she tells me quietly. Her young daughter even tried to stop him. After that day, everything changed. “I knew I had to get out. For her,” she says firmly. She’s not going back.

The day she left, her daughter helped her pack. They escaped while Lani’s abuser was at work. Lani said she could always tell when the night would be especially bad—when she knew he’d be coming home with alcohol. “I know when he drinks, he will abuse me,” she says.

Drugs and alcohol don’t cause abuse, but they can intensify it. For someone already using power and control to harm a partner, substance use can escalate the violence, making it more frequent, more volatile, and more dangerous. Lani fled on a night when she knew her abuser would be coming home with alcohol. And Shelter has been her safe place to land.

Being at Shelter has its challenges, Lani says. She doesn’t have a car and can’t drive, so she and her daughter are stuck at the shelter unless staff transports her for a job interview or a therapy appointment. But it’s worth it to be away from him.

“It’s a safe place to be while we’re waiting to get back on our feet,” she says. “I’ve never been in a place like this.”

Yet, the shadow of her abuser still looms in many ways, including an open Department of Human Resources (DHR) case. Lani clearly loves her daughter, but the trauma runs deep for both of them. Her daughter wasn’t just a witness—she tried to intervene during his abuse. Now, as her daughter begins healing from that trauma, Lani faces the challenge of proving that she can keep her daughter safe.

In some ways, this process has been helpful. Lani has carried trauma long before her most recent relationship, and therapy—though required—has been crucial and healing in ways she hadn’t anticipated.

“The therapist has been really nice,” Lani says. “Every time I go, I feel good.”

SafeHouse supports her in many ways, including parenting classes, helping her build the skills and confidence she needs. Still, Lani dreams of having her own little house where she can start fresh with her daughter—a place where she can forge her own path and decide how to spend her days.

“That’s my dream right now. A job. A house. A car,” she says. Her daughter wants that too, but she also loves being at SafeHouse. When they talk about moving to a new place, her daughter asks her, “can we take the staff?”

Lani asks, “Where will we put them?”

“In my room!” her daughter responds. “I’ll tell them to pack their stuff. They’re coming with us.”

When I return to the office, the staff share that Lani had been at SafeHouse for months before she fully revealed the extent of the abuse she endured. The fact that she is now opening up even to a stranger suggests she feels much safer here these days.

3:30 – 4:30: How We Care for Each Other

We are approaching second shift—the time during the day when the evening advocates begin to arrive. Shelter must be staffed at all times, and evenings have a lot going on. Clients are returning from jobs. Children come home from school. There is an evening meal to prepare. Usually clients take on that task, but sometimes it can be fraught depending on the relationships and the “vibe” that is currently present among the clients.

The evening and weekend advocates don’t always have the benefit of a director or manager present. All staff have to be empowered to make decisions. And they try to look out for each other. They write shift summaries and email them to each other so that incoming shifts know what to expect and what tasks need doing.

“Tonya [Calamusa, Shelter Advocate] gives some of the best shift summaries,” says Kathleen.

“She does!” agrees Lena.

“She’s such an observant, hands-on advocate.” Kathleen continues.

“And a good writer,” says Lena.

In today’s shift summary, Kathleen talks clothes. Despite spending a good chunk of the day sorting the donations that arrived this morning, the clothes still need to be bagged and stored. Kathleen hates leaving this task for the next shift, but she had to provide childcare for Lani during her therapy appointment and didn’t have time to finish. She also didn’t get to eat. Her lunch sits congealed and cold on the table. She knows she’s about to have to go home and have dinner with her family. But she’s absolutely starving now. She pops her food in the microwave at nearly 4:00 pm and glances over her shoulder at me. “This is Shelter life,” she says.

Shelter life is eating a cold meal sometimes. But it’s also taking care of each other. “We’re all friends. We share memes. We do things together. You’re in the trenches together. It’s not just this person whose name you know that’s beside you. So we spoil each other a little bit,” says Lena.

“It’s funny,” says Kathleen. “We’ve all bonded over food.”

They bring each other treats. Drinks, snacks, even whole meals that they’ve made at home.

“Tabatha does it all the time.” Says Kathleen. “She’ll make extra food and then say, ‘Hey, I’m bringing chicken wings to the office tomorrow.’ And so outside of the office, we know that we can just do the little acts of love for each other.”

The little things are what get you through the day at Shelter.

Day’s End

It’s 4:30 pm, and it’s time for me to head home. But before I leave, I have one more question. I ask Kathleen, is there a moment at Shelter that has stayed with you the most?

She tells me about an evening when a client went through a personal emergency, long after the day shift ended. Staff who’d left for the day were called back in to help. And the client, struggling through one of the worst nights of her life, saw Kathleen walk through the door. Immediately she said, with relief, “Oh Kathleen. You’re here.”

“In that moment, I felt like I had proved myself to be her safe space.” Kathleen says, “And that has stuck with me, because I want everyone in Shelter, if they’re having a moment of panic, to be able to look at me and say, ‘Oh Kathleen. You’re here.’”

“This is why I dream of clients,” Lena says. They get into your heart. You care about them deeply. “It follows you. … It’s not just a job.”

Leaving Shelter, I feel the weight of the day settle in—a mix of gratitude and respect. I’ve spent the day learning how much intention and care go into every part of life here. From helping a new resident settle in, to calming a child mid-meltdown, to handling back-to-back calls for support—every moment is an act of showing up.

The staff are quick to tell me that what I’ve witnessed today, as busy and unpredictable as it seemed to me, is actually a good day. On a good day, everyone is physically safe. There’s room to breathe. There’s time to listen. People make it to their appointments. Kids get to play. There’s laughter in the hallway or the sounds and smells of cooking drifting from the kitchen. It doesn’t mean the trauma is gone—but it means healing has room to begin.

A bad day might look very different. It might mean a resident has to leave suddenly. It might mean someone new arrives with only the clothes they’re wearing. It might mean a crisis call comes in with no easy answers, or we’re lacking a resource someone really needs. It might mean tensions among the clients. The line between good and bad days is thin and often out of anyone’s control—but through it all, the staff remains a steady presence. They make it possible for Shelter to be not just a place to stay, but a place where safety and hope are rebuilt, one moment at a time.

“It’s like that Rhianna Song,” Lena tells me. “’We Found Love in a Hopeless Place.’ This is the hopeless place. This is the place people go to when they are having the worst experience of their lives. But they can still make friends. They can still make connections.”

They can still rebuild their lives.

The work of Shelter isn’t done by one person alone—it’s a shared effort. Staff, community partners, and supporters all play a part in holding space for safety and healing. If you’ve ever wondered whether your support matters—it does. You’re part of the story, too.

Ways You Can Help SafeHouse:

Donate: Every dollar supports life-saving services for survivors and their children.

Give in-kind: Shelter is always in need of certain types of clothing, hygiene items, and cleaning supplies. Check out our Always Needed Donation List or donate  items right now with the Safehouse Wish List on DomesticShelters.org.

Volunteer: Whether it’s sorting donations or providing transportation, your time makes a difference.

Spread the word: Share our mission. Talk about domestic violence. Reduce stigma. Help others know where to turn.

You don’t have to work in Shelter to be part of what makes it possible. You just have to care—and take the next step.