Koube Ngaaje, the president and CEO of the District Alliance for Safe Housing, says she feels like her organization has been facing three pandemics: “COVID, domestic violence, and the racial reckoning that we are all living in, with a staff that is primarily people of color serving a community that is primarily people of color.”

Two years into a pandemic that led to alarming increases in domestic violence, Ngaaje says the number of requests DASH gets as one of the city’s largest providers of emergency and transitional housing to survivors is up more than 90% compared to pre-pandemic levels.

The D.C. government, one of DASH’s main funders, has not kept pace with the demand for services, she says. Throughout this budget season, which runs roughly from February to August, a number of organizations serving domestic violence survivors have raised the alarm about what they say is an increasingly dire financial situation.

“It is reprehensible that there isn’t a fully-funded plan to meet [domestic violence survivor] needs and invest in homicide prevention,” Dawn Dalton, the Executive Director of the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, testified at a D.C. Council budget hearing last Wednesday. “This reality is quite dangerous, and we have got to come to grips with this fact that survivors of domestic violence are not getting their needs met due to the failure of adequately investing in the service community.”

The Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants (OVSJG), the D.C. agency providing grants to a range of community based organizations working on public safety issues, including domestic violence response, says Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed budget will help address their concerns. But organizations that work on domestic violence issues say the proposed budget, which continues to benefit from federal COVID relief funding, fails to fill key holes from years of underfunding.

“It is really difficult when we are in such abundance to have to constantly, constantly fight for why this work is important,” Ngaaje says. “Everybody’s asking for money and everybody’s asking for resources. What is different about [domestic violence] and victim services is that it has historically always, always been underfunded.”

At a budget oversight hearing for OVSJG at the D.C. Council last week, organizations issued a series of dire warnings. Representatives from DASH testified they’d had to reduce programming this year and that they were at risk of losing their largest transitional housing location and ending their housing program for youth survivors.

Another provider of grief and trauma support for children and families said they’ve lost a quarter of their staff over the past year because of layoffs and resignations. The organization’s director wanted to offer cost of living increases and performance-based raises, she said, but couldn’t because the funding from OVSJG decreased.

During the middle of the hearing, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George took to Twitter to express her alarm at what she was hearing.

“The testimonies we are hearing right now during [the OVSJG] budget hearing are so alarming,” she wrote. “Our victim service providers are starved of adequate funding and transparency while the current rate of trauma exposure is steadily growing in our city…this is a public safety failure.”

Last year, the budget for OVSJG nearly doubled, thanks in part to an influx in federal COVID-19 funding. Bowser’s proposed budget for next fiscal year reduces the agency’s budget by about 10% from that large increase. OVSJG Director Michelle Garcia told DCist/WAMU that the overall reduction was “always planned,” including because this year’s budget had non-recurring costs for the purchase of property and renovations.

Garcia added that she felt the District’s ability to maintain these investments was unique, given that federal funding through the Department of Justice’s office for crime victims has declined over the past years. She said colleagues in other states are “having to do cuts across the board … for all their victim assistance,” while D.C. is not.

Even with last year’s bump, however, providers say the increase in the number and complexity of cases they are managing during the pandemic has left them stretched thin. DC SAFE, the District’s 24/7 crisis intervention agency for domestic violence, served about 6,000 clients a year before the pandemic — but since the start of the pandemic, that number has grown to 10,000 a year.

Providers say that while federal COVID relief funding was helpful, those dollars were tied specifically to the effects of COVID-19, meaning they couldn’t address historic funding deficiencies. Several providers testified before the council and told DCist/WAMU in interviews that while they may have received increased grants for specific projects this fiscal year, funding for staffing and core services remains flat.

Victims’ services providers are worried that the dollar amount that the Bowser administration has proposed for OVSJG next fiscal year won’t fill those gaps either.

“At best, this is just a really, really big mistake that was unintentionally made about investment. At worst, it’s designed to divest from [crime prevention and response],” said Bridgette Stumpf, the executive director of the Network for Victim Recovery of DC, which provides services for victims of crime, in an interview with DCist/WAMU.

The reduction in funds for OVSJG comes during a budget cycle where Bowser is proposing a $30 million increase for the Metropolitan Police Department.

“If we continue to be flat-funded by the city, there will be a time soon when we… may not be able to meet the needs of the survivors that are already accessing our services,” Natalia Otero, the executive director of DC SAFE, told DCist/WAMU in December, adding that they have already cut back significantly.

During her testimony on Wednesday, OVSJG Director Michelle Garcia said that her agency had heard these funding concerns and that Bowser’s proposed budget for next year “reflects specific investments to address those concerns,” including an increase of more than $3 million to support survivors of sexual assault, and a more than $4 million dollar increase for victim services.

Garcia added that part of the reason these organizations have experienced funding plateaus despite budget increases is that OVSJG has expanded the pool of organizations it is providing grants to, and “bringing more providers to the table to ensure that victims and survivors all across the District have access to the types of services that meet their needs.”

The DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which represents service providers across the District, says next year’s budget needs $27.93 million dollars more than last year’s budget to respond to meet the need.

(OVSJG has historically been the largest funder for domestic violence organizations but aspects of this budget request could also come from the Department of Human Services budget, which helps to fund certain housing programs, and other District agencies.)

Beyond funding concerns, some organizations complained that they no longer felt the organization was truly a partner, in part because of a lack of transparency about funding decisions. In past years, OVSJG publicly posted a list of recipients and amounts. Garcia says that list was not posted publicly ahead of this year’s budget hearings because they haven’t finished awarding funds.

“How was that money prioritized, and why?” asked Stumpf in her public testimony last week. “Part of the reason it’s so difficult to divine the true intention behind these decisions is the lack of effective communication about vision.”

“In years past, you’ve heard me refer to OVSJG as a funding partner,” testified Michelle Palmer, Executive Director of the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing, the organization that lost a quarter of its staff. “That partnership no longer exists… I don’t know what our relationship is now. I guess it’s whatever the opposite of partnership is. At best it feels ambiguous, and at its worst it feels frightening.”

Garcia said she was “very surprised” to hear these comments from grantees, telling DCist/WAMU that she felt her agency worked hard to provide community-based organizations with support securing federal COVID relief funds.

“I hear what they’re saying, but I’ll also say that we have done a lot to provide information both verbally and in writing, in presentations and one-on-one meetings,” said Garcia. “I think some of that frustration is more that they couldn’t do everything with the [American Rescue Plan] dollars that they wanted to do. I understand their frustration. But again, funding often has limitations.”

That influx in federal funding this year was not enough to prevent DASH from closing its Housing Resource Clinic, an arm of the organization that offered services like legal assistance, relationship office hours, and other outreach events twice a month.

“We stand in two truths,” said Ngaaje. “We stand in the truth of being incredibly grateful for all of the resources that the District has. And we also stand in the truth of saying we are asking the District to work closely with us to make sure that resources become available, so that these critical services can continue to survive.”