The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

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  • Patricia Bailey, director of the Women's Resource Center, stressed that aside from education and prevention, it is important for abusers to be held accountable under the law. If abusers are not held accountable, abusive behavior will never stop, she said. Rick Barbero

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March 25, 2012

WRC’s big problems come with big needs

By Sarah Plummer Register-Herald Reporter



“We have a lot on our plate, and big programs have big needs,” said Women’s Resource Center Director Patricia Bailey.

And those needs get harder to meet when state and federal grants and funding are always in jeopardy.

Bailey said when the Violence Against Women Act was passed in 1994, federal grants paid 100 percent of salaries, outreach office support, rents and utilities, making their job to provide services easier.

Over the years, the Women’s Resource Center and others across the nation have been faced with absorbing those costs.

“Individual contributions and the United Way of Southern West Virginia are the only way we can make up the difference we have lost in grant funding,” she said.

Besides supporting the United Way and offering individual monetary donations, the Women’s Resource Center can also use a wide variety of other types of donations.

Because many residents come to the Women’s Resource Center with nothing, they always need donations of clothing, personal care items, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoos, bed spreads, sheets, blankets, baby bottles, formula, laundry detergent and over-the-counter medications like Tylenol.

The center provides food for the residents, and they love getting donations of food or having local organizations doing a food drive for them to supplement the cost, she added.

Because the center continues to support victims as they move out into an apartment, the center accepts dishes, silverware, furniture, lamps, couches and other items needed to set up a household.

“If a victim has been here and is ready to move into an apartment, they don’t have anything, not even a fork. I can’t imagine what it would be like to start again and have to buy all of those things,” Bailey said.

For more information or to make a donation, visit www.wrcwv.org or call 304-255-2559.

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