Glass Houses

Saving Feminist Anti-Violence Agencies from Self-Destruction

Rebekkah Adams

The author first experienced a women’s shelter when she and her mother were two of the first residents in Toronto’s Interval House in 1974. Her research is drawn from that experience, her own years of working in shelters and sexual assault centres and the experiences of her fellow workers. Adams witnessed hierarchies that set apart clients and management, where an executive director and managers abused power in the same way she had experienced in the outside’ world of men. Perhaps most heartbreaking, she witnessed the most egalitarian, community-based, healthy and peaceful group of women she had come to know be destroyed by an agency devoid of feminist leadership, drunk on fear and dysfunction, which accused women of running a ‘cult.’ In this book Adams seeks to address these issues and find solutions.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Organizational Structure: Structural Issues, Boards of Directors, Non-Profit Agency Structure, The Executive Director
• Organizational Operation: Glass Ceilings in Feminist Organizations, Picking the Right Staff, Financial Matters
• The Organizational Administration: The Political, Language, The Fork and Spoon of Oppressive Behaviour and Cop-Outs
• The Organization: Feminist Issues, The Unconscious, Thematic Issues, Traumatic and Introspection, The Issues that Threaten to Deplete Us
• Bibliography

About the Author

Rebekkah Adams has worked for over 21 years in crisis/trauma work in both front line and senior management roles, in shelters for women and children, rape crisis centres, violence against women outreach programs, sexual abuse treatment programs and mental health treatment centres.  Rebekkah is an Expressive Arts and PlayTherapist, also holding diplomas in Police Sciences and certifications in Non-Profit Management and Human Resources.

She is a member of the Association of Traumatic Stress Specialists, International Association of Expressive Arts Therapists, The Canadian Women’s Studies Association of Canada, and International Critical Incident Stress Foundation.

She completed the Humber School for Writing Program and has worked as a journalist, children’s author, and fiction writer with an extensive portfolio of published works.  Most recently she has published Glass Houses: Saving Feminist Anti-Violence Agencies from Self-Destruction, which was featured at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences in British Columbia.  This book has been nominated for Book of the Year by the Canadian Women’s Studies Association.  She is also a member of The Writers’ union of Canada.

Excerpt

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