Some men are ripping the fabric of our communities apart through domestic and sexual violence.
Some men are repairing the harm.
The MENding Project is a violence intervention program implemented through Anna Marie’s Alliance domestic violence shelter in St. Cloud to help facilitate those repairs. This project acknowledges men’s unique opportunity to assist in ending men’s violence against women and our collective responsibility to do so.
Men in the community will be volunteering their time and resources to help alleviate the suffering after violence has been committed. Anna Marie’s Alliance shelters about 500 women and children per year from domestic abuse, and over 1,700 other women are served by the shelter seeking other services each year. The suffering women and their children experience is often associated with loss of income, loss of transportation through vandalism, loss of housing, broken windows and furniture, smashed walls, broken teeth, broken hearts, and torn families.
The MENding Project, originally designed by the Minnesota Men’s Action Network, was developed for caring men to build relationships and partnerships with area businesses in an effort to coordinate community based pledges for pro bono goods and services to help domestic and sexual violence survivors mend the harm that some men in our community have caused. The project also aims to give Anna Marie’s Alliance an opportunity to provide education to businesses on the impact of domestic violence and learn what services are available to those experiencing it.
WHY SHOULD WE AS MEN GET INVOLVED IN THIS PROJECT?
Men who sexually assault or batter women rely on other men to remain silent and to do nothing. They want you to believe that it is nobody’s business what they do to “their” wife or girlfriend. But, it is our business. 1 in 3 women will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime, and those women are friends, family members, classmates, coworkers, sisters, mothers, and daughters. The truth is, if domestic and sexual violence is going to stop, men will need to play a significant role in ending it.
It is time for us as men to get involved, standing up alongside women to say, “We will not allow this to happen in our community.” The MENding Project gives men that opportunity.
