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KEVIN GUTTING

Everywoman's Center associate director Becky Lockwood, center, meets with staff in Wilder Hall at the University of Massachusetts. She says budget cuts have meant fewer staff at the center, and a greater reliance on volunteers. Lockwood meets with, from left, crisis intervention counselor Maxene Anderson, administrative assistant Sonia Zelada and intern Megan Willey, with back to camera.

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KEVIN GUTTING

Everywoman's Center associate director Becky Lockwood, in center on couch, meets with staff in Wilder Hall at the University of Massachusetts earlier this month. From left are budget manager Mary Norton, crisis intervention counselor Maxene Anderson, administrative assistant Sonia Zelada and intern Megan Willey.

AMHERST - The University of Massachusetts Everywoman's Center operates under a cloud of instability.

The center has operated without a director for two years and there is no search planned.

Its budget has shrunk by at least 40 percent in the last 10 years; and half that budget comes in the form of competitive grants.

Programs and outreach have been scaled back.

The center now operates from three separate areas on campus, which makes it hard for it to really be the "center" its name implies.

The Everywoman's Center at UMass was one of the first women's centers established in the nation when it opened its doors in 1972, but today it is struggling to stay vital.

It is a rape crisis center providing sexual assault crisis counseling, in addition to running several programs dedicated to women's studies, the promotion of women, and overcoming sexual violence. Services are offered to students and the Hampshire County community at-large.

The Everywoman's Center operates on the margins at a time when about 2,500 sexual assaults are being reported annually to Massachusetts' 17 rape crisis centers, according to Jane Doe Inc., a nonprofit fighting sexual and domestic violence. Meanwhile, financial support for rape crisis centers is shrinking. The state used $1.48 million in stimulus funding to offset a 24.6 percent, or $909,000, cut to public sexual assault and domestic violence services.

In its heyday, the center had a much larger staff, including a director, office managers and professional staff supervising many different programs. In 1992, 20 years after its inception, the center employed 12 staff who oversaw 100 volunteers.

It published a regular newsletter, broadcast a radio show "Now's the Time," and had a public relations office headed by a professional overseeing 10 interns.

It organized professional development workshops, ran the Working Women's Program, which studied comparable worth, looking at questions such as why in the 1980s the predominantly male janitorial staff earned far more than the predominantly female secretaries. It provided sexual harassment advocates as well as sexual violence advocates to help women who have been assaulted.

It ran a Poor Women's Task Force, which helped disadvantaged women in the community attain higher education. The task force lives on for graduate students under the GRAD WAGES program. The Re-entry Women's Program, which provided support for female undergraduate students over age 25, however, did not survive.

For the EWC, it seems, the days of being a women's center at the center of campus life are long past. These days, the center struggles to keep its Facebook page active, with a staff of five who work with a crew of about 85 interns, volunteers and work study students. It has remained true to its original mission to help victims of sexual assault and runs a rape crisis hotline and counseling, but has lost many of the programs that pushed for political change.

At one time the center could be counted on to be at the vanguard of protest against all manner of violence against women- a priority that led staff and supporters in 1983 to hold a sit-in in the university's administration building over the firing of three center employees.

While the center did organize a Take Back the Night march this month, the EWC was surprisingly quiet when allegations surfaced that the UMass administration had mishandled a reported rape on campus last fall.

Advocates and staff maintain that the center continues to fill a need, even while the Police Department has stepped up its efforts to eradicate and address violence against women.

The Everywoman's Center is far from alone. In fact, its circumstances are mirrored by many of the 50-plus women's centers on college campuses across the nation, said Alison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women's Studies Association.

"There's a broader funding crisis in higher education," Kimmich said. "A lot of the smaller programs and divisions have experienced cutbacks."

Funding and results

It may be struggling to provide services, but there is evidence suggesting the campus as a whole is addressing sexual assault in multiple ways. Between the Everywoman's Center and UMass police, efforts on campus to curb sexual violence have produced results.

From 2003 through 2008, the most recent information available, forcible sexual offenses reported on the UMass Amherst campus decreased by 70 percent. In 2003 36 forcible sexual offenses were reported. In 2008, there were 11, according to the campus' legally mandated, self-reported data to the U.S. Department of Justice.

From 2003 through 2007, 26 reports of sexual assault, which include a range of violations, made their way to UMass officials. Of those cases, 11 of the accused perpetrators received sanctions and 15 cases were dismissed due to a lack of evidence, request of the victim or for other reasons, said Edward F. Blaguszewski, director of UMass news and information.

Whitehead said that this June just over half of UMass Amherst's police will be certified as sexual assault investigators, a certification that means officers have been trained in investigation techniques and victim sensitivity. It is the same training received by municipal police departments, Whitehead said.

The department also runs R.A.D. System- Rape Aggression Defense- training, which teaches students, faculty and staff how to avoid potentially dangerous situations and defend against an attacker.

Police are expected to receive additional training this summer when Mass hosts a national Jeanne Clery Act Training Seminar June 3-4 to address how to report and analyze campus crime, give timely public warnings, create adequate victim support services, and work with local police.

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act of 1998 requires all colleges and universities that participate in the federal student aid program to annually provide data on campus crime. The Clery Act, as its known in higher-ed circles, was an amendment to federal campus crime reporting law first established in 1965.

The act was named for Jeanne Clery, who was slain in her Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, dorm room in 1986. The Clery Act requires higher education institutions to give timely warnings of crimes that represent a threat to the safety of students or employees, and to make public their campus security policies. It also requires that crime data are collected, reported and disseminated to the campus community, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

"Officers want training. When a class is offered and a notice of an opportunity of a class goes up, officers jump on it," Whitehead said. "We never stop looking at what else we can do."

EWC faces challenges

But the question remains: More than 35 years after it was founded, what is the role of the Everywoman's Center on campus when funding is a perennial problem?

The need to spend time searching out and apply for grants is an additional drain on personnel, even as the center has cut staff.

"I have to look outside for more. The university has been struggling," said Becky M. Lockwood, the center's associate director of rape crisis services and violence prevention programs, noting UMass has been grappling with multimillion-dollar budget gaps in the last few years. "Part of my job is to look for alternative forms of funding. When we had more funding, we were really able to expand the parameters and outreach. It's something we're looking at doing now."

Lockwood has been with the Everywoman's Center since 2001. The largest annual operating budget the center has had in that time was about $1 million. This year it is running on $600,000.

Financially supporting the center is UMass and a patchwork of grants. Special events, the Women of Color Network, counseling services and the referral and information resources center are funded by UMass, a grant from the Five Colleges and a grant from the Graduate Student Senate. The rape crisis hotline and services are funded by the Department of Public Health and the Massachusetts Office of Victims Assistance Fund. The town of Amherst also provides support for the center.

The center has some concrete needs that cannot be addressed without cash.

"We definitely need a different administrative structure," said Lockwood.

She is one of three associate directors who report to an administrative supervisor, Bernette Melby, the UMass director of health services. Melby did not respond to requests for an interview. Outreach is down and without a director, and coordinating business, programs and fundraising efforts can be difficult.

"How can we make the best of this and create an administrative strategy that will help us be successful," Lockwood said.

An added problem is the way the center has been decentralized, with several sites on campus. The resource library and referral program is on the basement floor of Wilder Hall. Two floors up are the administrative offices and the program for women of color mentoring and cultural education. Some victim counseling also occurs there.

Across campus, the center's rape-crisis counseling services reside at Nelson House

A move to consolidate services in the African Mills House off Infirmary Way is planned before September, but when the move will get under way is unclear. Lockwood said there is an advantage to hosting the main rape-crisis services in Nelson House. The house is on the outskirts of the campus, which can make the center less intimidating for victims, she said.

On the other hand, having the Everywoman's Center consolidated would help the office coordinate activities and make overall office communication easier.

"It's challenging for sure," said Lockwood. She noted that campus institutions across the nation are suffering budget cuts following the recession. "In the midst of (financial) crisis we're doing all we can to hold on to what we can."

Yet one of the center's biggest challenges is one unlikely to change. The constant turnover of the center's target population- the students- makes persistent outreach critical to the center.

"One of the hardest things is the constant turnover in our population of 24,000 students. It's hard to get around and tell them about all our programs," said Lockwood. She said the center regularly discusses services with students as part of residential hall programing, but that she does not think most people on campus know what the Everywoman's Center is.

Indeed a general lack of education about sexual assault seems pervasive. It is not uncommon for the crisis hotline to receive calls from women unsure if they have been raped. "Unfortunately we continue to get the kind of client that, in our culture, people have been normalized to this. They don't know violence is not normal," Lockwood said. "Some have said they said no and the person went ahead and did it anyway, and they ask, 'Is that rape?' Most people don't think this will happen, so they don't know."