Nonprofit helps domestic violence victims get legal items ‘For Your Record’
Survivor uses her experience to help others navigate system
Posted
We just want to get people unstuck. That’s it. It can be really hard.”
Lisa Abelar, For Your Record founder
Help for victims
The AZ Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence has put together a website with its hotline and a variety of resources to help victims of sexual and domestic violence become survivors.
https://arizonasurvivors.org/
Donating
Those people who may wish to donate to For Your Record to help extend its reach can do so through the organization’s website.
On a crumpled piece of paper, written out in pencil and hanging in her Gilbert kitchen, Lisa Abelar has a Maya Angelou quote: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude about it.”
With that motto in mind and the experience gained from years of surviving domestic violence, Abelar built a nonprofit, For Your Record, that covers court fees, service charges and public records requests for survivors of domestic violence and other crimes.
"That was my frame of thought,” Abelar said about the paper. “‘OK, I don’t like what happened and how this thing turned out for me and my kids, but I can’t change it. So then what can I do?’”
She has done a lot since then. For Your Record launched in February 2021 and began giving grants six months later. Since then, it has handed out 123 grants, about six per month, usually for sums ranging from $125 to $600. It might not seem like much, but it is enough to help people get critical processes moving forward.
People like Sheryl (not her real name). Sheryl was in a long marriage, but her husband’s verbal and emotional abuse — infrequently, it was also physical — was increasing in the last three years of their marriage. It drove anxiety in her to the point where she had trouble getting out of bed to start the day.
After an incident involving their child, Sheryl had enough. She carefully prepared and made arrangements to leave and worked with For Your Record on the timing of service. In her case, she decided to stay until he was served because she knew he would not answer the door.
Abelar talked her through the tense moments waiting for the server to arrive — “My heart has never pounded so hard in my life,” Sheryl said — and her exit from the home as her husband was served an order of protection and divorce papers.
“She (Abelar) was so wonderful at communicating with me and saying, ‘They’re going to be there in about 10 minutes,’” Sheryl said. “Because she knew how I was doing this. She knew that I had to answer the door and call him to the door and slip out so that he could be served.”
Now divorced and finding her life much more peaceful, Sheryl credits Abelar, among others, for seeing her through the journey at a time when she said she felt “boxed in” and did not know where she could go.
Abelar’s story
Abelar can relate to Sheryl because she has been there herself. She had a whirlwind romance at work, and they moved in together after six months and were married a couple years later when she was age 23.
Not much alarming happened when they lived together — a few weird things she now calls “pink flags” but nothing truly concerning. But the pink flags turned red after marriage. Expectations were placed upon her that he did not put on himself. He was a little older and had been married before, so she accepted his version of what a marriage is.
The oft-described cycle started of fights, violent outbursts, followed by apologies and good times and expressions of gladness they could work through tough times.
But the bad times grew more frequent and the good times shorter.
The police would sometimes be called, but never by her. She would beg him not to, but he would call. Finally the day came. He shoved her into a wall with a kitchen table.
“And I was like, ‘Wow, this is it. We’re not going to be married anymore. This is it,’” she said. “That was my line.”
He called police again. But the responding officers had been to the home before. Though he had insisted his wife was losing it, they knew the score. They told her, “It’s time, Lisa, for you to go and get your order of protection and handle this.”
She did. She and her husband never lived together again, though he more than once violated the order of protection and more incidents happened.
Still, even with the order and an advocate helping her, she avoided going to court. Confronting him would leave her shaking like a leaf, she said. But after one too many incidents, he had crossed her line again.
"I was like, ‘All right, game on. I’m going,’” she said.
She never missed his court dates again. She crossed over from victim to survivor to advocate.
Today, she’s doing well professionally. She’s remarried with a husband who has been steadfastly supportive. And her three children from that first marriage are doing well in school and life.
Getting started
The seed for For Your Record came in October 2020. Abelar was four years out of her marriage by then, though the post-separation abuse meant the wounds were fresher than that. Just the previous February, she had filed for emergency custody after her ex-husband had been arrested for driving under the influence with their three children in the car.
It came together one day when she was on her deck. The death of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had triggered her frustrations with how “the system” works and got her thinking about making changes that were bigger than her.
“I just thought, ‘What’s missing? What do I know? What did I learn?’” Abelar said. “And it was that, ‘Man, I learned how to navigate stuff. I learned how to find public records because I had to request all my public records. … I now know what it costs to serve paperwork. I know how to do it. I know what it’s going to cost me to file these things. And I know that you’re totally alone while you’re doing it unless you have an attorney and can afford an attorney.”
She opened a notebook and wrote down what happened to her.
An idea stuck: “‘What if we create a fund that will help people in similar situations, specifically in abusive situations, who find themselves in these little financial traps and feel like they can’t move forward because of their lack of finances?’” Abelar said. “Lack of finances shouldn’t prohibit someone from having peace and safety in their life.”
She scribbled down how it could work, what it would look like and formalized a proposal. She sat on it for a couple of days, then put together a list of “smart” people who had reached out to support her on her way.
“I contacted all of them, and all of them said yes immediately,” Abelar said. “And they’re not just in Arizona, they’re all over the country — Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, California, Arizona.”
For months, they would get together by Zoom every couple weeks to iron out details — eligibility, assistance application, partnerships, fundraising. Finally, in February 2021, they were ready to go public within their personal networks.
"We just said, ‘Hey, we’ve been quietly doing this. We’d love your support because we want to get this thing going,’” Abelar said. “And I believe we had a very modest goal of raising $5,000 the first year, and we raised it within a week or something like that. So we were kind of off to the races, and we’ve just been doing it ever since.”
What it does
For Your Record primarily has worked through victim’s advocates in the judicial system who refer victims to the organization. Some people also find the website through a search or see the organization on social media.
Whatever way they come, they are set up with the application, which are processed quickly with an answer usually coming within 24 hours, sometimes sooner, sometimes even instantly under certain confidential circumstances.
“We just want to get people unstuck,” Abelar said. “That’s it. It can be really hard. My own experience, it took me several times to leave, and that’s like the statistic — it takes on average someone seven times to leave.”
To that end, For Your Record stays within a narrow lane: It pays for certain legal fees. Taking out an order of protection is free, but the cost of serving the abuser with that order is not. Police will serve the order for free, but if they are busy, it can take a couple of weeks, and in the meantime, the victim remains at risk.
For Your Record can have the service done quickly through a partner firm, ASAP Serve, and the bill will come to the organization, not the victim. ASAP Serve also gives For Your Record a discount on its services.
It was a natural partnership. Abelar had used them in her own legal dealings, establishing the relationship, and ASAP Serve owner John Osborn first got into the business because of trouble getting a “rogue” son-in-law served. Thus he sees the service of family law documents as especially important and personal for him.
“For Your Record just cares so much, and she (Abelar) is just quality people,” Osborn said.
Unlike an order of protection, most filings are not free. When Abelar had to file an emergency custody order, the cost was about $400, money she had but many survivors do not.
Abelar said even people who might seem to have the money might not really be in position to pay for fees or records. They may be cash poor or not have access to their own money or the abuser may get an automatic notification when money is spent, making it dangerous to access their money.
"The application isn’t based on financial need alone,” Abelar said. “It’s based on the temperature of the situation.”
Though there is less call for it, For Your Record also will pay for public records that a survivor may need to document prior convictions or police responses.
Response can be as fast as application acceptance. That is important because they do no reimbursements. But if, for example, $150 is needed to pay for a court filing, once acceptance is done, Abelar or one of the other volunteers is off to the bank for a certified check made out to the appropriate court. It’s then sent by courier so the survivor can have it to turn in with the filing.
Staying in that lane means having to say no sometimes. They cannot, for example, pay for a hotel room for a survivor to get out. In those cases, they refer to shelters or agencies better equipped to handle those situations.
“This is why we developed an approval guide, because we know all of our hearts and we know we’re like all ‘save-the-puppies’ people,” Abelar said “I mean, we’ve had those conversations, and we have to have a backstop that makes us say we can’t do that because otherwise we’d do it. We would go get a grocery card for somebody or we would go get gas cards for somebody, and our mission would be overwhelming.”
The future
At launch until now, For Your Record stayed relatively quiet, working almost exclusively in Arizona, mostly through victims’ advocates.
“If you have an advocate, you’ve been through something,” said Abelar, who praised her own advocate for the way she supported Abelar and even shrugging off her ex-husband’s attempts to intimidate the advocate.
But the organization also is at an inflection point. Word has gotten out. Its processes have stood up to stress. It is getting to be time to grow.
The only limitation is funding. They have money in the bank, enough to do their work at the size they are at now, but to date, the only fundraising has been done at a grassroots level. Growing in size will require growing the account.
They have done piloting in the other board members’ states. Serving paperwork is easy to do because you can find a process server anywhere, Abelar said. But other things vary by location, like filing fees and how payment is accepted. Still, Abelar knows this problem is not limited to Arizona.
“When we work with people out of state, it’s a case-by-case basis,” she said. “And we say, ‘If you have the patience to work with us on it, we have the patience to try to work through it with you. Throw us a bone, we’ll pay your fees.’”
Abelar was even approached by an elected attorney in North Carolina who found them on a search.
“She said, ‘Man, I’m going to keep my eye on you because we need something like this — literally everywhere.’”
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on Twitter. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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