Guilford County named the new director of its Family Justice Center Tuesday, and it’s someone who has been with the center since the beginning.
“We are thrilled to have Sonya Desai serve as the new Director of the Guilford County Family Justice Center,” said Natalie Craver, Assistant County Manager/Health and Human Services Director with the county.
Desai began as the center’s first front-line navigator shortly before it opened in 2015, offering the county’s first a “one-stop shop” for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, child and elder abuse. She has served as interim director since last year, seeing the staff through a fire that badly damaged the center’s Greensboro location.
“Sonya demonstrated incredible leadership in overseeing both the rapid opening of a temporary site at the Greensboro courthouse and return to their Greene Street location in February,” said Craver.
“Under Sonya’s direction, I am confident the Family Justice Center will continue advancing its mission and serve as a leader in the field: providing steady, compassionate care to those impacted by domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse, and sexual assault.”
We caught up with Desai after Tuesday’s announcement to talk about her career, the center’s growth, its current work, and what’s next.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Congratulations on the new position. I remember when the Guilford County Family Justice Center was an idea that the county was trying to make a reality. In the past 11 years, it’s grown rapidly, with sites in both Greensboro and High Point. And you’ve been there the whole journey?
Thank you. Yes, I have. You know, I think it shows that if you work really hard, and if you believe in the mission, and if you are mentored properly, you can really advance in the county. And so I was really lucky. I’ve been surrounded by really amazing people who have acted very much like mentors to me. So I think it’s a little bit of a mix between that and just my passion for the field.
Talk to me about how you got involved with this kind of work. Did you have experiences where you or someone you knew needed this kind of help, drawing you to help others?
Well, I went to school for sociology, and I concentrated in criminology at UNCG. I was one of the first people to graduate with that concentration in criminology. So a lot of people do ask me, am I a survivor? Did I grow up in a household with domestic violence? And no, none of that.
I grew up in a really healthy home. I grew up with great parents, a great family, plenty of support systems, plenty of opportunities, and resources. And I believe that all people should be afforded that in their life. Whether they’re a child or in a relationship, I believe that home should be a safe place. We have to do everything that we can in order to make sure that survivors in this community are safe and offenders are held accountable for these crimes that they’re committing.
I’ve always had an interest in serving my community, being a part of something that was greater than me. And I knew coming to the Family Justice Center that we had a great leader from the beginning, Catherine Johnson. I knew that it was going to be big. I just didn’t know how great it was going to be.
Johnson left the Family Justice Center last September to become president and CEO with the Alliance for HOPE International. When you stepped into the interim director position, the organization had grown so substantially from its beginnings. What does its scope look like now?
Yes, when it started, it was just the director, me in the frontline navigator role, and one admin person. That was not sustainable. No one could take a vacation. No one could even take a break.
But we will celebrate our 11th anniversary next month, and we’re about 110,000 clients strong now. Our partnerships have expanded. We’ve added medical services. We have added immediate crisis counseling services. We created a legal services program through Elon Law and, of course, our site in High Point.
We’ve also added more personnel to the Family Justice Center staff. We have 16 people now between both centers. That’s just our core staff. You need that core staff for referrals to be appropriate, for survivors to get what they need in this multi-disciplinary model.
Guilford County serves as a training hub now for so many counties beginning to do this work. I just spoke with Montana last week and with Alabama. We have the Wilmington, North Carolina, folks coming in next week. What we do and our operation is really seen as best practice.
You’re already covering an awful lot of ground. What’s next?
We are working with our local law enforcement agencies between Greensboro and High Point. We’re working with Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC), so we’re creating, helping with handling ICAC cases. We’re really trying to make a one-stop shop for victims of that crime, because we have a trauma-informed child advocacy center here.
We want our peer support for clients coming into the building. Our caseloads right now are just bursting at the seams. What we know about survivors is, the more people who rally around them, the better their outcome will be. So there’s nothing like having a cop and an attorney, a medical provider, a social worker, an advocate, a counselor, all telling a survivor that they can do it, that they can be successful with help, support, and intervention.
We’re looking at our domestic violence electronic monitoring program right now, figuring out how we can better coordinate with them and with the courts. We want to expand our elder justice initiative because we know we are seeing that elderly population grow, and it’s just going to get bigger in the next ten years. So we’re looking at how we can help protect that population against the people who are targeting our elders with scams and fraud right now.
That’s a lot of work ahead of you. Good luck with it. I hope we’ll have the chance to write about some of it as it comes to fruition.
Thank you. I feel lucky to be doing this work every day, and I’m very grateful to be doing it in this new position.