A local rape crisis center has received federal money for a giant upgrade that, if Town of Highland approvals are issued, will expand its services to include residential units.
Fair Haven Rape Crisis Center has secured just more than $1.8 million to purchase the building in which it’s resided for the last 20 years to add “stabilization housing,” its founder and Executive Director Kelly Vates announced during an April 25 press conference. Called Portside Suites, each of the proposed four units will have its own kitchen, bathroom and laundry facilities, she said.
Victims of sexual violence will be able to stay at the residence for up to nine months, and they won’t have to pay a dime, she said.
The money — which couldn’t have been announced at a better time since April is Sexual Assault Awareness month, according to Vates — will help what the center is expecting will surpass the 498 sexual assault and human trafficking victims it helped in 2023. Parsing it down to hours, Fair Haven put in 212 hours for advocacy, 267 hours for therapy, 89 hours in assisting clients with medical appointments, 476 hours manning the crisis line, 245 for outreach and 736 for secondary services, among other services they provide, she said.
Vates said she owed their success to Roger and Patricia Sims, who owned the building when she initially rented a 10×13 office in 2004, she said.
“Roger was a businessman, and I’m not. I love people — budgets? Not so much,” Vates said. “He passed in 2019, but he was such an ally.”
Portside Suites would provide significant help to the Lake County Prosecutor’s office, Lake County Prosecutor Bernie Carter said, because it’ll provide a safe space for victims for whom the office is trying their cases.
“When we deal with victims, such as East Asian victims, they don’t speak English, and we have to protect them for them to testify,” he told the crowd. “Traffickers will come back for them, and they become willing participants (if we can’t keep them safe). We just had a nine-month investigation, in fact, where we lost two of the three victims (because they went back to their abusers).”
State Rep. Julie Olthoff, R-Crown Point, has been on Fair Haven’s Board of Directors for many years and said she’s had a “front row seat” to the good works Fair Haven provides. In Indiana, one in three women and one in 21 men will report sexual assault, she said.
“Fair Haven is one of only 16 crisis centers of its type in Indiana, so Northwest Indiana, and indeed the state, desperately needs a place like this — especially for victims of trafficking, to find the help they need,” Olthoff, who’s also chairing the organization’s building committee, said.
U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan, D-Highland, who secured $750,000 in Community Project funding for Fair Haven, said the day was “for the survivors.”
“Today is so that the survivors know that they are not alone going through this journey,” Mrvan said. “This shelter not only will be a physical space in which they can come and come together, but it’s also a place to find compassion, solidarity and hope.”
Additional funds for the project came from the Lake County Community Economic Development Department, which allocated $1,075,000 in HOME Investment Partnerships money from the American Rescue Plan, its director, Tim Brown, said.
After purchasing the building within the next 30 days, Fair Haven will start the process of permitting and use variances, Vates said. She said the town has been supportive.
In the past, the town itself has run afoul with its delegation of special-use variances: In 2022, U.S. Judge Philip Simon upheld a claim in favor of Fishers-based Chosen Healthcare Indiana that “plausibly alleges that Highland pursued an unfair zoning process” after the Highland was going to allow it in 2019 to repurpose the former nursing home on Fifth Street to become a residential drug treatment facility, but then reneged in 2020 when the new council was installed.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
