Shelter Services
Anna Marie’s Alliance shelters women who have survived domestic violence, their children, and their pets. Among the services available to families at the shelter is a full-time, on-site daycare.
Anna Marie’s Shelter Services
Anna Marie’s Shelter services ensure housing needs are met for women who have experienced domestic violence and their children.
Located in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, our shelter is a safe place where victims receive secure, safe, temporary residence. We provide them with the physical and mental health assistance they need to begin the healing process, and connect them with community resources that exist to help them.
Our shelter advocates are key players in the process of starting over. By providing survivors of domestic violence with a caring, understanding, and nonjudgmental support system throughout their difficult transitions, advocates help to empower women to find their way, create safe new homes for themselves, and to sustain this new way of life.
The shelter houses up to 36 women and children at a time. Along with support services, the shelter provides food, childcare, healthcare, and basic necessities for stays of up to 45 days.
Upon leaving Anna Marie’s Shelter, aftercare advocates continue to work closely with resident women. Never alone in their journeys, clients are empowered to make the foundational changes that lead to better, stronger, happier ways of living. Backed with advocates’ confidence in them, and connected to community resources they require, our clients are able to create and sustain new boundaries and break the abuse cycle for good.
Jill Eckhoff Transition House
Anna Marie’s three-bedroom transitional house offers a safe, secure, and supportive environment for women when they are ready to leave our shelter. For many, leaving the safe, structured environment at the shelter for a new home of their own can be a leap that is overwhelming, and for some, unfeasible. At the Eckhoff House, women are able to prepare for the next step in their journey. By gaining stability and having the time and space they need in order to learn to maintain that stability, clients are far more confident and skilled in areas they may be lacking in.
Due to the chaotic nature of their lives with their former abusers, many have never had the chance to learn certain parenting skills. Frequently, our women have not carried the responsibility of financing a household because their abusers were the sole income earners, or, more often, had total control over family finances and used that control to keep women from leaving. Often residents are facing the daunting reality that with independence comes responsibilities they simply have had no experience managing.
The Jill Eckhoff Transition House is a space where our clients are able to master the skills that they need, but have not been able to focus their energy on. With the help of advocates who are committed to assisting them in meeting long-term needs, women at the Eckhoff House can focus primarily on building their parenting and other skills, learn how to plan financially, manage time, and develop in ways that move them toward sustainable independence, permanent housing, and employment.
Pet Safe Home
Studies show that 60% of women who are victimized in their homes will remain in those homes if the alternative means being forced to leave behind beloved pets.
Animals are family members for many residents, and the idea of leaving behind their cats, dogs, and other pets, which are often a source of great comfort to them when the rest of their lives are out of their own control, is too difficult to bear. Leaving an abuser is extremely difficult in any circumstance, but to do so knowing that the very worst could or will happen to the animals that they love and that rely upon them for safety and basic needs is a deal breaker for so many victims of violence, even those who desperately want to get away and find a better way to live. They simply cannot leave pets to a fate that is unimaginable, and often they won’t.
This understanding is what motivated Anna Marie’s staff and board to build our on-site pet shelter, the first of its kind in Minnesota. Women who enter our facility come not only with their children; their furry family members are welcomed, as well.
To visit, play with, care for, and take familiar comfort in their pets, families at the shelter only have to walk a short distance to the Pet Safe Home, where they find peace of mind in knowing that we are ensuring the safety of animals with the same vigilance as we do our residents. Families are never separated; security is paramount, and, for many, this new sense of safety lifts a burden they have born for years. Something as simple as Anna Marie’s Pet Safe Home, a small, comfortable, staffed building on the grounds of our shelter, allows survivors of violence the chance to find a sense of what it means to live without constant worry and fear for themselves, their kids, and the animals they hold so dear.