The center provides a rape crisis hotline as well as counseling, advocacy and education.
Rebecca Lockwood, associate director of Counseling and Rape Crisis Services, at the UMass Center for Women & Community.
AMHERST — In the fall of 1972, the average salary was $9,697, the unemployment rate was under 6 percent and it cost 8 cents to post a letter.
It was then that Everywoman’s Center was created as a project of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Division of Continuing Education, with two paid staff and a focus on helping “mature” women reach their educational and career goals.
Now 40 years and a few months later, with a $750,000 budget, a suite of offices in New Africa House at UMass, a dozen professionals and dozens of volunteers, the renamed Center for Women & Community is celebrating its four-decade history with a gala Feb. 22 in the Amherst room of the Campus Center.
State Rep. Ellen Story, D-Amherst, will talk about what it was like being one of the first female legislators in the state. She was first elected in 1992. Valerie Young, author of "The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women," will sign books and speak. Young earned her bachelor's and doctorate’s degrees at UMass.
Until September, the center was known as the Everywoman’s Center, explained Rebecca Lockwood, associate director of Counseling and Rape Crisis Services at the center, where she has worked for 11 years.
But staff a couple of years the staff began questioning whether the name still fit the center's mission and identity.
And the answer was no. “There were a lot of reasons,” Lockwood said.
In part, the center wanted people of all genders to feel comfortable seeking the services - that meant women, men, and people who are changing genders.
Also she said the center “serves the broader community…it’s not just for the campus.”
In fact, last year, the center answered about the same number of hotline calls from the community at large as it did from members of the Five College campus community, which is made up of UMass and Smith, Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Hampshire colleges.
In general, about 60 percent of its work is to the non-campus community.
The center provides medical services, legal advocacy, rape crisis counseling, sexual abuse prevention, support groups and workshops among its services.
When the center started, there was no women’s studies program at the university and the UMassUniversity Without Walls, which caters to older students, had just come on line.
But as those programs began, the focus of Everywoman’s Center moved to providing rape crisis and counseling services. Rape crisis centers didn’t start opening until 1972 in big cities throughout the country, Lockwood said.
Still while the organization focus changed, its commitment to justice and peace issues has been a constant thread throughout its history, Lockwood said. The organization works to support and advocate for women of color, Latina women and those who are unsure about their gender or are making the transition.
Ashley Papineau, 25, was sexually assaulted when she was 14 but didn’t understand how it affected her life until she started volunteer training at the center.
The 2011 UMass graduate got help as she helped others. “When someone is sexually assaulted, all of their power is taken away from them,” she said.
The center helped her and others “get as much power back to them (as possible,)” she said.
“I don’t think I’d be OK without the Everywoman’s Center, I would feel a lot more disconnected… They gave me amazing tools how to process (what happened) and how to cope.”
Papineau, who lives in Holyoke, is still volunteering. “I think the organization is undervalued. Sexual assault is so prevalent and no one really talks about it much, ” she said. She plans to pursue her master’s degree in social work at Westfield State University in the fall.
Pamela Dutta has heard the relief in voices when as a volunteer she has answered hotline calls and when she has gone to the hospital to advocate for a woman who had been assaulted. “It’s not an organization, it’s real,” she said of the center. “It’s giving real people real help.”
And that help, she said, is available 24 hours a day.
When people call, “it’s really a bad situation… When they’re done they have some hope and there’s always a plan,” she said.
She is looking forward to the celebration Friday night. "I think it's fabulous I’m going to be be part of it."
At the celebration, the center will be presenting Leadership and Advocacy Awards. Janet Aalfs, former poet laureate of Northampton, will receive the arts award; Mary Kociela, director of domestic violence projects for the Northwestern District Attorney's Office, the politics award; Arlene Avakian, a founder of the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at UMASS, the pioneer in the field award.
Three are being honored with a social justice advocacy award: Lisa Andrews, co-coordinator of development and one of the founders of The Prison Birth Project; Vira Douangmany Cage a Lao American, mother and community organizer; and Linda Scott, assistant director for Consultation and Education at the Center for Counseling and Psychological at UMass.
Tonights gala is sold out, but donations are welcome. Visit the center’s website.