Meeting the MECASA mission. At MECASA, we value: • Serving, connecting, and leading a broad community of providers, partners, and stakeholders; • Both prevention and intervention as central to our work; • Priority setting based on community-led assessments of strengths and needs; • The expertise provided by national research and leaders, as well as local wisdom gained through experience and application; • Victim-centered, evidence-informed, and traumasensitive solutions to issues of sexual violence and their underlying causes; and • A guiding framework of social justice, antioppression, and intersectionality. Over the last year, MECASA staff has been hard at work improving Maine’s efforts to prevent and respond to sexual violence. We continue to be grateful for the partnerships of Maine’s sexual assault service providers, our funders, donors, and statewide and national partners which make our work possible. As always, it is difficult to distill a year’s worth of work into a list of highlights, but key efforts last fiscal year included: • Working closely with the Department of Health and Human Services to develop a policy and screening for youth in the state’s care who are at risk for trafficking and exploitation and training every Child Protective Services worker on that policy as well as the issue more broadly. • Reaching almost 800,000 people via our updated websites and social media networks. • Supporting a significant expansion of the availability of Children’s Advocacy Centers to victims of child sexual abuse and their nonoffending caregivers. • Creating a screening tool for LGBTQ+ identified survivors to use to find knowledgeable and affirming primary care. • Establishing a statewide database, which allows for better collection and analysis of statewide client and education services. • Supporting innovative approaches to community-based prevention programming through our mini-grant program. • Creating a statewide training, Human Trafficking in Maine: Identification and Response, and training Maine’s human trafficking multidisciplinary groups to deliver the curriculum. • Partnering with Pine Tree Legal Assistance to dramatically expand the availability of civil legal services for victims of sexual violence. Thank you for your partnership in and support of this work. We are honored to do this work and are proud do it alongside such dedicated allies. Please contact us for more information about any of our programming. Elizabeth Ward Saxl Executive Director MECASA FY2016 Annual Report 2
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