My Personal Experinences

My personal experience with the Battered Women's Shelter of Summit County was through my volunteer training courses March 29- April 2, 2009. I went to the B.W.S. main office building in Akron for my volunteer training courses for four nights that week. During those courses I learned all about the history of the B.W.S., deviance, the cycle of violence, crisis intervention, the shelter services, listening and communication skills, court services, stalking, the effects domestic violence has on children and all the shelter has to offer to children. (If you check out some of my older blogs I go into more detail about all of these things I learned.) Each day of my training we had a couple different facilitators. This was because the people that taught us the different things were actually the head people involved with them. We were receiving real information from the actual people who are doing what they taught us. That was very interesting to hear. Like I said before, they were training us exactly the same as they train their staff members. We were learning lots of valuable information. It was a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. I knew it was going to be pretty intense since we had to go through a twenty hour training before we could volunteer, but I really enjoyed it. It definitely makes me feel a lot more empathetic towards women going through domestic violence. I feel like I understand more of why it's such a struggle to get out of an abusive relationship. I really hope I can finish my training soon, so that I can start volunteering at the B.W.S. I'm really happy that I decided to do this training and get to learn firsthand from the actual people who deal with it daily.