How people like Brenda Glass help violent crime survivors rebuild

Brenda Glass and Kevin talk at a large folding table in a mostly unadorned cafeteria. In her late 60s, Ms. Glass looks at him with a motherly mix of pride and concern. Kevin, despite being in his late 30s, seems like a kid on his best behavior – polite and reverent toward the woman he describes as a mother figure and angel, and toward the quiet community space that’s been his refuge. (After twice being the victim of gun violence, Kevin asked that his birth name not be used.)

In March 2022, Kevin survived a shooting. He remembers lying in the hospital feeling “stressed out,” paranoid that the shooters were still targeting him. When a nurse asked if he felt safe, he said no. Soon, he was on the phone with Ms. Glass and found his “home away from home.”

“It was like someone’s got my back,” he says, visibly relieved. “It was safe. I can go somewhere safe. Especially in that dark moment I was in.”

That safe place is the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center, of which Ms. Glass is founder and CEO. Housed in a portion of a church, the center sits in a Cleveland neighborhood known for violent crime.   

Starting with one trauma recovery center in San Francisco in the early 2000s, TRCs like this one now number more than 50 and operate in states spanning the political spectrum. 

As the United States searches for solutions to violence, TRCs have generated cooperation and promising results by challenging a long-standing – though often faulty – assumption in the criminal justice system that those committing violent crime and those suffering from it are different people. 

As with other TRCs, Ms. Glass offers services to anyone looking to escape violence, even if they’ve participated in it. That’s part of the TRC strategy: detailed case management and personalized, wraparound services for people who have been involved in serious violence and want to escape it. In Kevin’s case, he received 16 weeks of counseling and safe housing for him and his family. That help is paired with what Ms. Glass calls “a mindset shift” to remove people “physically and mentally” from violence. 

“[Society doesn’t] have what we need to support people who become the victims or the perpetrators, so we send people to the court,” Ms. Glass says. “How they gonna clean the streets up? The only way we gonna clean the streets up is in the street, and not through death – through resources, through opportunities, through hope.” 

TRCs collectively serve a few thousand people a year, and supporters often note that they’ll never be a one-stop solution to violence. But they’ve caught the eye of policymakers by getting results like reduced PTSD symptoms and quicker returns to work and life activities – all among populations typically excluded from victim services.

In their holistic approach, TRCs illustrate the immense care and cooperation needed to stem the tide of violence. In their relatively quick spread across the country, they show both the best practices for and the pains of growth. And by pairing victim services and violence prevention, rather than pitting them against each other, they pull lessons for safety from the murky space where victim and perpetrator overlap.

The centers are, Ms. Glass says, smiling, “not your typical agency.” On a given day, she and staff might hold multiple counseling sessions and give several rides. If a client needs groceries or prescriptions, staff gets them. If someone needs to move in the middle of the night, staff finds them housing. And the 16 weeks of counseling may include four to five home visits per week. 

“We’ve had people on our team work with survivors to clean their apartments up,” says Stephen Massey, director of the Citilookout TRC in Springfield, Ohio. “Maybe they were so depressed or scared or still in shock that they couldn’t do the basic things that keep them afloat like get a meal, take the trash out, feed their pets.”

This seemingly infinite list of what TRCs do began taking shape in 1999. Alicia Boccellari was working at what was then called San Francisco General Hospital, a Level I trauma center. 

“One day in passing,” Dr. Boccellari remembers, “the head of the trauma surgical unit, an amazing surgeon by the name of Bill Schecter, said to me, ‘We can sew them up, but we can’t make them well.’”

That struck a chord with Dr. Boccellari’s psychology background. All the hospital could offer was a community mental health center referral, “and then we would keep our fingers crossed,” she says. 

Dr. Boccellari started envisioning individualized victim services.

“[Medical professionals] tend to assume we know what people need rather than asking them,” she says. When staff actually started inquiring, “a lot of people said, ‘We need safe housing. We need physical help getting back on our feet. We need help with child care and transportation. We need help in talking to the police.’” 

Based on these insights, the first TRC was born in 2001 at University of California San Francisco Health. Quickly, its work challenged assumptions about best practices. Rather than peppering people with questions or services upfront, the TRC team built safety and connection over time. 

If TRCs are to operate successfully in the fog of violence, trust is the lighthouse. In addition to putting in time with clients, Ms. Glass and others earn trust, in part, by being credible messengers – people who have survived the type of circumstances they now help others through. 

That Ms. Glass’ past looks like the lives of her clients surprises many of them, and it’s a story she’s only recently grown comfortable sharing. 

After surviving violent traumas in her childhood, Ms. Glass lashed out against the world. “At that point,” she says, “nobody is going to make anybody else pay but me. And everybody’s gotta pay.”

Like many facing serious violence, Ms. Glass realized that talking to the police could carry a cost to her own or her family’s safety. It might also come with racial hostility. With no hope for justice, she says she unleashed her fury in a tangle of rage, shame, and desperation.

“I hated God. I started doing everything under the sun to destroy my life and anybody’s life around me, making big money all the time,” she remembers. Then, she says, while delivering drugs one day, “I knew it was either I was gonna die that day, or I was going to the penitentiary. And I didn’t care.” 

She did go to the penitentiary, serving a little over two years. There, she connected with her faith and her history – filled with harm both caused and suffered.

Ms. Glass’ transformation is encapsulated in what’s become something of a motto for her: “Whatever you’re going through, you deserve to go through it with dignity.” 

TRCs are typically housed in a hospital or with other community groups, and clients come through various avenues, including street outreach and referrals from other agencies or even from law enforcement. 

“We have really tried to make it as easy as possible to get people connected to our services ... and also individualizing that approach,” says Kim Miiller, a clinical psychologist and the director of trauma recovery and resilience at Chicago’s Advocate TRC, a hospital-based center. 

“We connect survivors with their why for recovery,” says Alyson Simmons, founder of the Central Iowa TRC. “Every person deserves the right and opportunity to heal, to the degree that it’s possible for them, and it will look very different for everyone.”

Nikeya Clark’s idea of healing grew as she did. 

Engaging with a TRC near her home in New Jersey after the shooting death of her oldest son, Ms. Clark welcomed the initial 16 weeks of counseling. Then, she asked for – and was granted – another 16. 

“During my counseling sessions, we didn’t only speak on the grief; we spoke about everything,” remembers Ms. Clark. 

She recalls TRC staff delivering food, coats, and Christmas gifts for her two sons. Then, during a conversation, she mentioned wanting to get her high school diploma. 

“[My counselor] referred me to this online program here in Newark, New Jersey, where I can actually go and get my high school diploma, not my GED. So last June, I graduated as the salutatorian of my class.” 

The TRC experience, she says, is not all about trauma. Instead, Ms. Clark says, it’s a way of helping connect people to their goals, even in the face of tremendous obstacles. She says that perspective can help “minimize the crime.” 

The level of cooperation required to knit together individualized communities of support is both gargantuan and necessary. Mr. Massey in Springfield, Ohio, says TRCs must be able to collaborate with “shelters, police, law enforcement, EMTs, hospitals, churches, food banks. Just anyone who can help.”

Many acts of violence never get reported, which can place TRCs in a unique position. Unlike diversionary programs or alternative sentencing, TRCs may deal with violent acts outside of any law enforcement activity. TRC staff members understand the profound fear and potentially negative consequences that dissuade some clients from reporting the violence they experienced, but staff also supports those who decide to report crimes and abuse. 

Not all TRCs maintain a close relationship with law enforcement, but Mr. Massey’s staff goes as far as helping to train local police officers. Some have even worked with special-crimes units, Mr. Massey says, describing the relationship as “really robust.”

“They call on us. We sit, we talk, we strategize about what has happened to these victims, how to keep them safe, what are their needs,” he says.

All TRC teams use some version of a therapeutic “life stability tool” to measure clients’ progress, says Ms. Simmons, from Iowa. This tool looks at external factors that can lead people to slip back into harmful behaviors as well as their internal state. 

“It was employment; it was their financial concerns, social supports or lack thereof, housing, transportation, food insecurity,” Ms. Simmons says, along with clinical measures of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. 

“You’re able to see that [when] those needs are met and fulfilled, they’re healthier mentally and emotionally. They’re able to focus. They show up for their appointments. They’re consistent,” she adds.

Of all the needs, housing might be the most difficult to fulfill. Nonprofits searching for safe, sometimes long-term housing for people with histories that alarm landlords encounter a laborious and often prohibitively expensive process.

Antoine “Mikey” Dotson, founder of the Glass center’s safe housing initiative, says he’s seen the number of available units yo-yo from around two dozen to single digits and back, all while he’s trying to rapidly rehouse people in danger. He’s candid that they rely, largely, on generosity. 

Yet despite round-the-clock support and customized plans, success isn’t guaranteed. Housing provided by a TRC might be the first safe space a client has ever lived in. Adapting to that sometimes proves too difficult. And some, as many TRC staff members say, just aren’t ready to make the transition.

“They need the understanding that it’s gonna take a lot of willpower and determination to grow out of what you’ve been living your whole, entire life – the only thing you know,” Mr. Dotson says.

But some people are ready to change. Nickey, who feels safer withholding her last name, is one of them. She first came to the Cleveland center after police killed her son. But, as she tells it, she was also living in the wreckage of other traumas – an “undignified” life. She “could barely walk a straight line,” she says, worn down by years of grief, substance use, and unhealthy relationships.

One day when she drops in, she and Ms. Glass talk about feeling shame, being seen, and “shaking legacies” of trauma. With help from what Nickey calls the TRC’s “ladder of resources,” she is now certified in massage therapy and is training further to land a job. Her reason for choosing that career? To reacquaint trauma survivors with safe touch. 

Success stories like that have drawn bipartisan political attention. A study of the first TRC found that clients were 56% more likely to return to work than other survivors. A wider-ranging study of 261 TRC clients in more than a dozen centers in California showed an average 52% drop in PTSD symptoms, while another nationwide analysis found 96% of clients reporting that TRC services “helped them feel better emotionally.” 

Notably, a study of the MetroHealth TRC in Ohio indicated the ripple effect of clients’ progress: Engagement with mental health resources through the TRC reduced the likelihood of that person committing a crime by nearly two-thirds. 

All these outcomes are happening among groups historically least likely to access victim services but most likely to be impacted by violent crime – people of color, unhoused people, and LGBTQ+ people. 

One of the qualities that sets TRCs apart in victim services is the rare, but growing, belief with which they operate: that victim services and violence prevention are one and the same. The TRC model acknowledges the often cyclical nature of violence, which could mean that today’s survivor engaged in that violence and might become tomorrow’s perpetrator. It also recognizes that even those participating in violence often seek an escape from it.

Recent research found that 1 out of every 14 people surviving gun violence will be shot again within a year; in eight years, it’s 1 in 6. And people who have faced violence, including children, become much more likely to perpetrate it, studies show.

“The myth is: Here’s the people who commit crimes, and here’s the victims,” says Lenore Anderson, co-founder and president of the public safety nonprofit Alliance for Safety and Justice. “The reality is it’s more like a Venn diagram. ... The life circumstances that people who commit crime face are virtually indistinguishable from the life circumstances that people who are chronically hurt by crime face.” So, those in the middle may be victims and perpetrators. 

That’s where Lily fits. (She asked that her last name be withheld.) Sitting at the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), a TRC serving unhoused women and gender-diverse people in Los Angeles, she recalls her desperation to escape violence, but also the times she caused it. 

“I was both,” she says.

In “a toxic relationship” and barely surviving on Skid Row, she was eventually referred to the DWC, where she was given safe housing, a therapist, and other services.

“It’s teaching me where all this behavior came from, or my way of thinking,” she says. 

Lily has now spent months sober, living with her dog in a DWC-run apartment. But in the typical victims’ rights paradigm, Lily’s history would render her ineligible for help.

Sixty years ago, victims’ rights in the U.S. was barely an idea. As Ms. Anderson outlines in her book, “In Their Names,” the victims’ rights movement launched after Earl Warren’s Supreme Court of the 1960s enshrined several rights of accused people in criminal proceedings, such as Miranda rights and the right to counsel. Many saw these decisions as an insult to victims and began organizing to protect their rights. 

The victims’ rights movement quickly gathered near-unanimous bipartisan support from politicians and law enforcement, who saw the opportunity to increase budgets and political power, Ms. Anderson explains.

The first victims’ rights wave was a strong voice in creating essential tools, such as victim compensation funds, rape crisis centers, and stronger protections for domestic violence survivors. Legal reform took off, too. “From the 1980s to 2010s,” Ms. Anderson writes, “over 32,000 laws seeking to advance victims’ rights were enacted.”

But the movement overlooked a lot. Almost immediately, well-off white women became the face of victims and of those fearing rising crime. This approach was very successful at building support and getting laws passed, but it failed to create much that was accessible to low-income, urban communities facing the bulk of violence. 

Victim compensation funds are typically unavailable to people who, like Lily, have been involved in a crime during the violence they experienced. Many states have a strict time frame for reporting the crime to law enforcement, or require cooperation with police, and a few exclude people with past convictions. 

“You have to show proof that the crime happened. You have to show proof that [the money you’re requesting] was a result of the crime,” says Amy Turk, CEO of the DWC. And the funding available is for reimbursement, she adds, which assumes that applicants can pay upfront for medical or funeral costs, for example.

Many survivors at TRCs have no idea these funds even exist. Others don’t want the further trauma they fear the legal system would inflict. And their expectation of actually receiving help is low, which may be justified. While no nationwide numbers exist, an Associated Press investigation found people of color were disproportionately denied victims’ rights funding in 19 of 23 states studied. But TRC staff helps clients who want to tackle the complicated paperwork and laws involved in applying.

The required engagement with law enforcement in the hope of finding the perpetrator also misses what many survivors actually want – help that goes beyond punishment.

The largest exploration of survivor perspectives is gathered in Crime Survivors Speak, commissioned by the Alliance for Safety and Justice in 2016 and again in 2022. Surveying 1,537 crime victims, the report found people of color, LGBTQ+ people, low-income communities, and people with criminal convictions vastly overrepresented. But across demographics, survivors generally supported rehabilitation over punishment (57% to 33%), mental health investments over prison (77% to 12%), and shorter sentences over mandatory terms (73% to 20%).  

“What most survivors want is for the thing that happened to them to never happen again and never happen to anyone else,” notes Ms. Anderson. “It is also well known among a wide diversity of survivors that the way to stop someone from ever doing that again is unlikely to come from our prison system.”

Despite the different approach between TRCs and the traditional victims’ rights movement, TRC staff and supporters see the centers as not a refutation, but an evolution.

“Victim services, victim rights ... it’s a result of a revolution that’s ongoing,” says John Maki, former executive director of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority and a key person in bringing TRCs to Illinois. “The trauma recovery center is the unfolding of that revolution.”         

Just as bipartisan support ushered in the first wave of victims’ rights, the next step might be a quieter bipartisan openness to expanding those services, based in part on TRCs’ success.

In 2013, the first TRC published positive results that caught the attention of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. Realizing they had similar goals, the two organizations started pitching the TRC model across the country. 

One of the first states outside California to adopt the approach was Ohio, where Republican Gov. Mike DeWine was attorney general at the time. Working in that office, Michael Sheline, section chief for Crime Victim Services, learned of TRCs in 2014.

“We were really focusing on meeting the needs of those that were underserved, and maybe did not access traditional victim service programs, such as a rape crisis center or domestic violence shelter,” says Mr. Sheline. “And we were also concerned about those that were victims of other violent crimes like gun violence.” 

“When I happened upon [the first TRC’s data and results], I was like, why hadn’t I come into contact with this before? It made sense,” adds Mr. Sheline, who describes his role as “nonpolitical.”

The majority of TRCs operate in states with Democratic governors, but Ms. Simmons says that in Iowa, much of the support she has gotten has come from Republicans. And Republican support was necessary in Florida as well. 

But the relatively rapid spread of TRCs has been somewhat of a double-edged sword. While data from individual centers has been strong, national data on effectiveness is sparse. But in 2019, Dr. Boccellari founded the National Alliance of Trauma Recovery Centers, and she says work is underway to standardize and deepen their measurements. 

Not surprisingly, perhaps, funding is a concern. Despite the relatively low annual cost of about $1.2 million per center, policy enthusiasm hasn’t kept money coming in. TRCs typically get funding through the Victims of Crime Act. But VOCA coffers are filled by fines and penalties from federal prosecutions of white-collar crime, and a sharp and prolonged reduction in those prosecutions across the Trump and Biden administrations has driven VOCA funding down, from more than $13 billion in 2017 to barely more than $1 billion this fiscal year.

Ms. Glass in Cleveland says her staff “works full time but gets paid part time.” And both she and Ms. Simmons in Iowa mention having put up personal money to keep their TRCs running. 

But the newest TRC, launched in November in Austin, Texas, may avoid the current financial crunch. Funded by the city and Travis County rather than by the state, the Harvest Trauma Recovery Center is Texas’ only TRC, but it has a strategic head start. It’s run by the African American Youth Harvest Foundation, a well-established community organization. As a bonus, the TRC is in a building with dozens of other service providers, so the cooperation needed is close at hand.

“Our model was 120 [people per year],” says founder and CEO Michael Lofton. “Our first seven weeks, we’re already at 96.”

Chief Clinical Officer Calvin Kelly credits the national TRC network for the center’s  ability to navigate that quick start. “All of those pieces: the assertive outreach, the case management, getting people connected to those resources. ... Being a part of that national model gave us the structure,” Dr. Kelly says. 

Of course, individual clients’ progress doesn’t always follow a predictable model. 

Back in Cleveland, Kevin experienced another shooting. He was the random victim of gang activity at his apartment complex. Now he’s back with Ms. Glass, once again trying to keep his family safe while processing another life-altering incident. Even so, he’s gotten a warehouse job and is working to find safe, permanent housing. 

Lily isn’t sure what comes next, but she wants to help others, possibly as a home health care worker. She says it’s not easy, that “trials and tribulations” continue. But she’s learned breathing and meditation exercises to help her work through difficult moments, and she’s practicing other life skills like budgeting her money. She says her story reminds her of the character on her shirt: the Grinch.

And Ms. Clark, the salutatorian at her graduation, says that, while grief still appears in unexpected places, she’s now equipped to handle her emotions and create a healthier life for her children. 

“I didn’t know how to cope with my grief and still be a mom at the same time,” she remembers. But after she went through the program and counseling, she says, “My now-14-year-old son, he said, ‘Mommy, I see a big difference.’”