Family Support Services

CORA’s Supportive Housing program provides transitional and permanent housing for one to three years for individuals and families impacted by intimate partner abuse. The Transitional Housing program provides survivors and their children with up to one year of housing at no cost. To build future self-sufficiency, clients commit to saving a portion of their income for use after leaving the program. Our Permanent Housing program provides survivors and their children with up to three years of subsidized housing; for these clients, the subsidy decreases slightly every year in order to foster self-sufficiency, but Permanent Housing clients are expected to save less since they are also paying part of their rent. After three years, our Permanent Housing clients have the opportunity to continue living in their place, with the lease in their name. This program is made possible by the partnerships CORA has created with local landlords who are amenable to renting their properties to CORA clients. In addition to our wraparound services, CORA’s family advocates provide weekly self-sufficiency workshops for Supportive Housing clients. These help clients with saving money, improving credit, finding housing, learning about the different types of housing available, and other topics.

We offer individual, family and group counseling for survivors of intimate partner abuse and their children. The overall goal of our counseling is to help participants learn how to cope with their personal trauma so as to reduce their trauma symptoms and enhance their sense of well-being. The objectives of our counseling services center around increasing our clients’ repertoire of coping strategies, reducing their depression, assisting with their short and long-term safety planning and decreasing their feelings of isolation. To achieve these objectives, our counselors work with individuals and groups to address issues that enhance long-term healing, such as family safety planning, education about intimate partner abuse and its effects on children, child development education, parenting skill-building and stress management.

CORA focuses intensively on helping children heal from exposure to intimate partner abuse through our trauma-informed Children’s Program, which utilizes developmental assessments and parent consultations, transformational art therapy (A Window between Worlds), and early literacy curriculum (Raising a Reader). Individualized, psycho-educational consultations with parents strengthen their understanding of the effects of exposure to intimate partner abuse on children and family members. Personalized help and support for each child, along with artistic and literary activities, construct a mechanism for healthy brain development and parent-to-child engagement after abuse. Offering child play groups at the same time as adult support groups ensures that no parent misses support groups due to lack of childcare. Additionally, CORA’s Children’s Program Coordinator advocates for clients and their children with local schools and other county resources for children and families.