HAS SUCCESS SPOILED THE FAMILY PLACE?

THE WHITE HARD HAT ON PAIGE F1.iNK’S blonde, shoulder-length hair matches the thin lines in her charcoal-gray pinstriped pantsuit. As she strides through the construction site, saws screaming and sawdust flying, Flink points with obvious pride at the amenities soon to be roughed in. The location is secret but the accomplishment is unmistakable. In a few short years, executive director Flink and the board of directors of the Family Place raised $5.3 million-above and beyond its annual budget-to build this 55,000-square-foot “safe campus.”

Everything learned over two decades of counseling victims of domestic violence has gone into the design of the site, which contains an emergency shelter, day care, transitional housing, medical care, therapy services, and a job training center. “We had to build it big because this is how big the problem is.” Flink says.

Bold statements are characteristic of Flink and her agency, both of which have become well known for their salesmanship. In Dallas social service circles, the Family Place has forged a reputation for innovative programs, steamroller fund-raising, and-in attracting the kind of supporters necessary to get things done–more than a little overt social climbing. The combination has proved to be powerful: The Family Place has quadrupled in size in the last 10 years. In 1993. it beat out 1.400 applicants nationwide to snare a $5 million Housing and Urban Development grant.

Back at her spacious, modern office. Flink gives me the statistics on domestic abuse with a sure grasp of the numbers and the magnitude of the problem. Flink wants me to know just how important the agency is. why it matters so much to help these women. To illustrate her points, she pulls out heart-breaking artwork by abused women and children.

She takes me on a tour of the present facility, pointing out where children do play therapy and women have painted their anguish on T-shirts. She may have given this same tour a thousand times, but she communicates with such passion that it seems as if the thoughts have just occurred to her. As I listen, I can’t help admiring her technique as much as I admire her work.

Flink is an excellent salesperson. Yet I also pick up a tone I didn’t expect. Flink clearly wants me to understand the nobility of her intentions. as if that alone should be enough to forestall any questions. Since I am there for the sole purpose of asking questions, this gives the sales pitch an undertone of tension. 1 am predisposed to like Flink. After all, we share a history: She worked as an ad rep at D Magazine in the 1980s. I wasn’t on staff then, but colleagues from those days describe her as a “can-do” woman who turned her desire to help people into a career–a bulldozer in pink lipstick.

Her sales style has worked well, Perhaps because of Flink’s own experience in the media, the agency’s press is always laudatory.

Local TV stations donated funds to help decorate their offices. Belo employees sit on the board, and the Morning News practically anointed Flink in its “High Profile” section.

The Family Place began in the late ’70s as a loose coalition of North Dallas women determined to help victims of domestic violence. Flink started as a volunteer, then became the agency’s paid fund-raiser. When she took over as executive director in 1997, she became the official face of the Family Place. She brought in board members such as WFAA-TV Channel 8’s Gloria Campos, restaurateur AI Biernat, D Magazine chum and socialite Darlene Cass, and entrepreneur Gene Street. Flink’s passion for the subject and her ability to explain it to others like her-white Park Cities moms- made her a local mini-celebrity.

Now, as executive director, Flink earns $100,000 a year. Last year the agency had an operating budget of more than $4.5 million, which covers a range of services, including outreach counseling for victims and batterers. But the innovative .supportive living program is its centerpiece and the biggest chunk of its budget. Each year, the agency receives about $1 million in federal funds for an intensive program that gives homeless abused women free rent, day care, job training, education, and virtually everything else they need for up to 18 months.

Flink says the Family Place raises an additional half-million dollars per year on top of the $ 1 million it receives in HUD funds, which over six years have totaled more than $8 million, the bulk of which has gone for supportive living. She adds, “I think we could serve twice as many people if we had more funds.” But the Family Place’s critics raise a startling question: Would that really be a good thing? Thai question has brought me to the Family Place. It has led me to conduct extensive interviews with current and former employees, to examine documents obtained through confidential sources, and to obtain public records from HUD and the 1RS. These suggest the Family Place has grown so fast that internal stresses threaten to pull it apart.

A lawsuit filed in federal court against the agency leads to a similar conclusion. The three plaintiffs accuse the Family Place of racial discrimination, betraying clients and employees, misleading donors, and falsifying numbers to keep state and federal funds. Several years ago, an investigation ordered by the board (whose results were kept secret from employees and federal oversight agencies) substantiated some clients’ complaints of racial discrimination and abusive behavior by staff members.

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit first came to the Family Place as a victim, entered the program as a “client,” then was enlisted as a board member, and finally was hired as an employee. Ironically, for years she has been touted as the agency’s premier success story.

DEBORAH DAUPHINE’S DISSATISFACTION WITH THE FAMILY Place originated with a meeting intended to soothe the dissatisfaction of others. In late February 1997, Diane McGauley, then the agency’s executive director, asked her to sit in on a session with two recent graduates of the supportive living program. They said they were representing a handful of black women still in the program. Abused by their husbands, homeless, these women had 18 months to turn their lives around-all expenses paid. But instead of expressing gratitude, the women complained of racial discrimination and mistreatment by a few white staff members.

McGauley, who is white, hoped that Dauphine, an African-American, could mediate the dispute. She was a logical choice. Dauphine credited the Family Place with saving her life. After growing up with abusive parents. Dauphine had progressed from one abusive marriage to another. In 1991, after one husband put a gun to her head, she (led to a Family Place shelter with two of her children.

Accepted into the supportive living program, then small and funded with local donations, Dauphine resided for almost two years in a Family Place apartment while she and her children received counseling and day care. Dauphine learned parenting skills, got a good full-time job, and graduated from the program.

“They made me deal with the issues ]of child abuse and incest],” says Dauphine, who is now 43. “I was able to get over the self-pity, to stop focusing on the past, and more on where I was going.”

Articulate and pretty, Dauphine was asked to become a spokesperson for the Family Place. “She was their prize,” says one former caseworker. “She was a good recovery story. She carried herself differently, not like she was from the bad side of town.”

As an unpaid volunteer. Dauphine was taken on fund-raising sorties, where she spoke to socialites who cried as she told her story. In May 1993. Dauphine was invited to be on the Family Place’s board. Happy to be the “poster girl” of the supportive living program, she was thrilled when the Family Place received the prestigious HUD grant that seemed to validate the agency’s good work. Dauphine never asked if her success was the exception or the rule.

So at the meeting Dauphine was shocked by what the women described. “This can’t be happening at my Family Place,” she said in the agency’s defense. But she had to admit that their complaints about one counselor reflected her own experience. Dauphine felt McGauley wanted her to help pacify the women. Dauphine remembers trying to gel McGauley to understand that it was more than a matter of public relations. “Diane, if this is true, we need to find out.” she told her friend.

A reluctant McGauley took the complaints to the executive committee, Days later McGauley offered Dauphine a job in the program as a way of demonstrating the agency’s concern. Convinced she could make a difference, Dauphine accepted. At the same time, the executive board brought in Dallas “diversity expert” Hattie Hill to investigate the charges. For several months Hill interviewed clients and staff. Everyone anxiously awaited her report.

Hill made her presentation in early May to the executive committee. The report was not released to the public or even shared with most of the staff. Instead. McGauley was abruptly-and without explanation-placed on administrative leave. Two weeks later, after hiring an attorney, she was back, occupying the same office and holding the same title but with severely constricted duties. To restore herself fully to her former operating role. McGauley submitted an “Operations Action Plan” to the board. Her lengthy memo, obtained by D Magazine, shows that the Hill investigation not only had confirmed allegations of racial discrimination, but had also found turmoil, harassment, intimidation, high attrition, and other significant problems.

Surprisingly, McGauley’s assessment reads like an indictment of her own leadership, not to mention the board’s oversight:

“Territoriality, vindictiveness, and punitive reactions are the driving forces upon which decisions are being made. Reprimands, denial of staff requests, arbitrary decisions on resource allocations, autocratic supervisory behaviors, and denial of due process are reported by staff, and are verifiable….The allegations of racial inequities, combined with the polarization of staff into ’camps’ by a few persons resulted in the dilution of credibility within the local community.”

McGauley wrote that it was important to address the Hill report, whose “findings tend to support the allegations of the clients…. The agency and its Board are potentially liable for civil rights violations if brought forward by either clients or staff.”

A week later. McGauley was out-this time permanently. There can be little doubt that she was forced to resign. The agency’s 1997 1RS filings show McGauley was paid S173.275 for five months of work, which clearly includes a settlement (Under the terms of that settlement, McGauley refused to comment. Hill also declined to comment.) Flink was named interim director. Nothing more was heard about the Hill report. But the bad news wasn’t going away.

With the dust still unsettled, a white counselor named Nancy Wunderlick wrote her own confidential memo to the board. A psychologist with seven years tenure at the Family Place, she charged that serious problems pervaded the agency.

In the memo, obtained by D Magazine, Wunderlick alerted the board to the fact that the hotline was turning away clients seeking emergency shelter and that the Safe Home Outreach, which placed women in homes around the community, was a failure. The Family Place boasted that it had 40 to 60 such homes. But at most, only 15 homeowners agreed to provide space, and only three or four had actually accepted clients. (Shut down shortly thereafter, the program is still promoted on the agency’s web site.)

Wunderlick also reported that the agency’s staff was frequently subjected to “coercion and threats, intimidation, emotional abuse, and isolation” by the four white caseworkers in question. She cited numerous complaints she had heard from women in the program, including employees taking monetary donations intended for clients and publicly discussing the “falsification of funding reports.” (Wunderlick did not return phone calls.)

Dauphine knew little of this. She never saw the Hill report. Not until she began working al the agency did she discover how much her beloved Family Place had changed.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, BARELY TWO MONTHS AFTER HILL HAD made her report and McGauley had been terminated, women of every shape, color, age, and size (and a tew uneasy men) filled a hotel room in downtown Dallas. The staff had grown from 20 in the early 1990s-when Dauphine first fled to the Family Place–to almost 100 employees. After a hasty search the board had named Paige Flink executive director, despite the fact that she had no professional training in psychology or social services. Although McGauley was gone, the women who had been the focus of the complaints were still in place-and two had received promotions.

There for a mandatory two-day “bridge building” exercise, employees were asked to define their various identities-the single mothers, the lesbians, the blacks-then asked to role-play, bringing up issues in a “positive” way. Dauphine role-played with one white employee whose behavior had caused so many complaints. “How come we haven’t seen the results of the Hattie Hill investigation?” Dauphine asked her. “Why do you have to bring this up?” the counselor demanded in return. “We’re trying to move on.”

A woman in the accounting department asked aloud. “When are we going to stop fudging the numbers?” Dauphine says, “Everybody got real quiet.” While reports to the board stated that 40 women were enrolled in supportive living, everyone knew only a dozen or so actually were. “The response was, ’We’re not here to attack.’” The people who raised serious questions in the meeting began to feel peer pressure to keep quiet. lThe fear set in,” one former staffer says.

Dauphine concentrated on locating good apartments for clients, helping them sign up for permanent housing, and making home visits. At her annual evaluation, supervisor Angela Bedford-Bartee gave Dauphine high marks. “Deborah’s personal experience with [domestic violence] gives her an understanding that the rest of the staff does not have.” However, Bedford-Bartee also noted that when clients failed or lacked motivation, Dauphine became frustrated.

In fact, Dauphine was disheartened. The supportive environment she remembered was gone. Flink had brought in more minority employees, such as Bedford-Bartee, but Dauphine thought that black and Hispanic clients still received disparate treatment. Staff morale was low. Although the counselors were dedicated to clients, the administrators seemed patronizing. “Poor things. They’re helpless. We ’re saving their lives. “

But Dauphine’s biggest complaint was the lack of accountability. As a client, Dauphine had been required to attend group counseling and hold a job to pay for her own food, rent, and utilities. Now clients were discouraged from having jobs at the beginning of the program. They were supposed to work on their “issues” and get training. Bui often when Dauphine slopped by their apartments she’d find clients still in bed or watching soap operas at 11 a.m. Many refused to attend therapy regularly or go to school. Some frequently violated the 10 p.m. curfew: one worked at a head shop until 1 a.m. Some frequently had men in their homes.

“Women weren’t making it to the end of the program,” Dauphine says. “They hadn’t accomplished anything.” But when Dauphine brought those concerns up at staff meetings, she was told she was too pessimistic, that “some women are more abused than you were.”

Other former employees describe similar problems. “It was difficult to get the women in transitional housing to follow through,” says KaSandra Cantu, a social worker who got women into training or education programs and then helped them obtain jobs. “A lot weren’t used to the freedom.” Clients told Cantu she couldn’t make them go, since a goal of the program was making their own decisions. “[We had | a management team that says just give them what they want- we don’t want complaints,” Cantu says. “It was a numbers game.”

Though originally funded to serve 50 clients at a time, when the grant was renewed in 1997, the agency’s transitional housing program was downsized to serve only 30. As a board member, Dauphine had been told the program was full with a waiting list. After being hired, she learned there were only 12 clients. To hold their existing clients accountable for their actions might result in falling below the minimum level for government funding.

Dauphine says pressure to keep the numbers up led to security problems. One day Dauphine and another caseworker were making a home visit when they found the client’s crack-addict boyfriend hiding under the bed. They alerted her counselor. Protocol called for the woman to be moved out of the apartment and into a shelter for her own protection: or. if she continued to allow the man to stay with her, to be thrown out of the program.

“When we got back to the center, Paige had already told the director not to move this woman,” Dauphine says. “We were upset because he could be abusing her and we could be liable. That went against all our rules.” (Bedford-Bartee says that if staff members find a man in a client’s apartment, it’s a “hard and fast policy” that the woman will be kicked out of the program.)

But Flink didn’t want to hear anything negative. Dauphine says. ’’She wanted success stories.”

The agency holds graduations twice a year, in June and November. Caseworkers joked that they had to be inventive to say something positive at the ceremony. For example, of the seven or eight women who graduated in June 1998, several didn’t show up. One client had stopped coming to counseling and dropped out of school. On a home visit Dauphine was told by the apartment manager that the client had been dealing drugs and living with a man. She had sold the furniture given to her by the Family Place and sublet her apartment.

then moved out of state. Nevertheless she “graduated,” with a caseworker lauding her non-existent accomplishments.

When asked about the agency’s success rate, Flink says in the supportive living program, of the 50 clients per year, more than 80 percent have permanent housing and 70 percent have a job at graduation. Sixty-five percent have obtained divorces from their abusive spouses. “How we define success is something we talk about a lot here.” Flink says. “Sometimes the success is in the children.”

They must also talk a tot about how they present their numbers. From July 1994 through December 1999. 131 women had entered the supportive living program, not “50 per year,” as Flink claimed.

Its monthly newsletter in March reported 101 supportive living clients for 1997, 101 for 1998, and 106 for 1999. giving the clear impression that 308 women have gone through the program in those years. Though women may overlap several years, making comparison difficult, only 77 women entered the program after September 1996.

Flink’s percentages of women who obtained housing and jobs would be correct if she meant only graduates, not women in the program. Unfortunately, a HUD report for 1997-98 prepared by two UT Arlington researchers, Dr. Charles Mindel and Dr. Monica Applewhite, showed that of 94 clients in the program to that date, only 57 percent had graduated. So far, of ] 33 women in the program through January 1, 2000, 69 graduated and 64 left the program without completing it.

To increase the graduation rate, the report recommended the agency begin screening applicants for psychological problems and substance abuse. It also suggested they admit only those clients with a reasonable chance of success.

But the Family Place seems to have placed itself in a social services Catch-22, If it didn’t admit enough people to the program or “exited” too many, it couldn’t qualify for HUD money, and HUD money funds the jobs of the people that work there. The agency began requiring clients to live in communal homes for six months instead of their own apartments; the idea was to provide a strong support network. It increased the empha-sis on counseling and developing personal goals.

The Family Place also began ignoring its own rules, say former employees. Caseworkers were no longer allowed to terminate women for violating restrictions about having men in their homes or using drugs. Dauphine says she was told to obtain housing for live illegal immigrants and a woman who had a drug felony-women who may have needed help, but from some other social services agency. Employment specialist KaSandra Cantu says she resigned after her supervisor told her to get a job for an undocumented worker, an illegal act that could have resulted in the loss of her social work license. “I couldn’t stand the way they were treating clients and employees.” Cantu says. “From what I saw. it didn’t work. It needs an overall revamping of the system.”

In fact, Dauphine says that, despite millions of dollars spent and the number of people employed, of the several dozen clients she worked with in supportive living for two years, she can count on one hand the number of the Family Place’s true success stories. She was one of them. Then the Family Place fired her.



In March 1999, a frustrated Dauphine decided to tell her story to the media in the hopes that it would wake up the board. Two years after Dauphine went to work for the agency that had saved her life-and days after she talked to Miriam Rosen of the Dallas Observer-she was called in to her supervisor’s office. Told she had been accused of encouraging clients to file complaints and of giving confidential information to clients, she was put on administrative leave. On March 29 she was fired. She was not told which clients had complained or what they had said.

After eight years of involvement with the agency, Dauphine was humiliated. The final straw was when her application for unemployment benefits was denied because the Family Place said she was fired for “misconduct.” An appeals tribunal ruled in her favor.

In October, Dauphine filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the Family Place of racial discrimination and retaliation. She was joined in the lawsuit by two caseworkers: Yolanda Pusey, a bilingual Hispanic counselor who was fired, and Debra Dirden, an African-American counselor who says she resigned under pressure. All three are represented by Karen Shropshire (wife of D Magazine contributing editor Mike Shropshire).

Family Place board president Rick Sutherland says the board investigated the claims and found they were “100 percent unfounded.”

Dauphine’s life is radically different than the day she fled to the Family Place. For the last eight years she’s supported herself and her family. Her daughter has graduated from high .school, her son was recently commissioned as an officer in the Navy, and she has not been in an abusive relationship since 1991. She has a good job working for a high-tech firm in Piano. But she’s angry because the Family Place has traded tough love for big program success.

“I think she felt she would be letting clients down if she didn’t speak up.” says one former administrator who worked at the agency many years. As the agency began to scramble for funds to meet all the needs of abused women, the choice became quality or quantity.

“Sometimes big isn’t better,” the long-time employee says sadly. “Big is bigger.”

Flink doesn’t see it that way. “If we’re able to save a life and it costs a million dollars, I’d be willing to spend it.”

Flink’s position is no surprise.

The response from Family Place executives, its board, and its supporters has consistently been one of denial. Instead of acting to correct problems, the agency’s reflex is to cover them up. Its own internal reports, the UT Arlington assessments, and Dauphine’s lawsuit raise troubling questions about ils management, credibility, and most important of all, its approach to the long-term treatment of abused women. Its “positive spin” seems to have spun out of control, to the point of ignoring reality.

When those volunteers gathered in the 1970s to protect abused women, the Family Place had a worthwhile mission. It still does. But has its primary mission now become to protect itself?