They offer temporary shelter for women and their children, presumably at a confidential locale to avoid violent confrontation of the very kind alternate shelter is designed to curtail.
They have a webpage http://www.alexandrahouse.org/community_program.html indicating:
Community Program
Community Program provides advocacy and support services to Anoka County women, children and families who are experiencing violence in their lives, but who may not necessarily need emergency shelter. Advocates work in the civil and criminal courts, health care, and educational/school settings.
Alexandra House has recently piloted the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) project, "Choose Respect." Through teaching middle school-aged youth to respect themselves and others, future violence and risky behaviors can be prevented. Visit:
http://www.chooserespect.org/scripts/
to learn more!
Legal Advocates:
* Assist in filing Orders for Protection and Harassment Restraining Orders
* Accompany victims to court hearings
* Provide crime victim advocacy immediately following a domestic assault and throughout the criminal court process
* Lead support groups
* Follow-up with patients referred by health care providers 24-hours a day
The page links from the Alexandra House page are above as they give them. One link toggles to this "definition," their definition, with italics emphasis added.
Order for Protection
Orders for Protection are court orders designed to protect victims of domestic violence from their abusers.
Their "Choose Respect" link seems defective, the correct link, now, appearing to be:
http://www.chooserespect.org/scripts/index.asp
From their home pages you can toggle to their "Community Education & Professional Training" and their "Order for Protection Project" pages, set out below via screenshots so a reader may click either image to enlarge and read it.
I believe the general orientation of this organization is laudable, and beyond reproach. However, organizations like this and the people in or affiliated with them must be vigilant to not become overzealous in ways that might detract from the respect that otherwise would be accorded; just as "badge heavy" cops detract from community respect for law enforcement in general.
Specifically, such vigilance should reach to unprofessional uses of the family law calendar, such as non-domestic situations, non-violent situations - but where a woman does not like public criticism or commentary and would wrongly and abusively go onto a court's family law calendar to belligerently attack speech by another.
In such a hypothetical situation, the role of the advocate, be it a privately retained lawyer or a "shelter house" helping person should be to disarm any and all such abusive uses of a calendar clearly meant for other things. One hopes Alexandra House personnel have the wisdom to understand and follow such decent and proper thinking.
After all, the founding fathers enshrined free speech as constitutionally protected from the start of the Constitution replacing the Articles of Confederacy. That is because the right to speak out is so clearly fundamental, and one of the first things that dictatorial governments would want to control and manage and stifle.
Protections against domestic violence were only later recognized, as was female suffrage. Universal suffrage and free speech are bedrock democratic needs for democracy to work. Family violence policing is a more local community function, and democracy will not fail if it is accorded less or more attention.
Bottom line - don't cheapen a good thing, ever, by misdirecting effort to things that are constitutionally beloved - such as a stranger's right to criticize conduct of another - it is not a domestic-relations thing, not at all, and it is a perversion of justice for it to ever end up on a court's domestic abuse calendar.
Every effort to winnow out abuse of the calendar serves to strengthen the respect in the comminity for the calendar, and its proper use. Every effort an organization like Alexandra House can make to exercise its discretionary effort to avoid cheapening itself must be preconcieved and followed. Again as stated in other contexts, respect has to be earned.