Faith Communities Survey Project

Background
The mission of Lydia’s House is to be a place of healing and a voice of hope for abused women and their children. This voice of hope resounds through the work we do directly with the women and children. This voice of hope is also heard as we educate local faith communities and work with them to be supporters of abused women and their children. Our hope is that the faith communities will join in the chorus of voices who speak hope to all those who have suffered from abuse. To this end, we are seeking to create an educational program that can be used to help us help our local faith communities work with abused women and their children.

What we realize is that we do not know what our local faith communities do or do not know about the issue of domestic violence. Because domestic violence is also viewed and understood through different lenses of culture, race, geography and tradition, in order to create an effective educational program we need to gather information from the faith communities.

This gathering of information, informally known as the Domestic Violence Faith Community Survey Project, consists of two basic phases. The first phase includes putting together a list of faith communities that represent the diversity of faith traditions in the St. Louis area. Once these faith communities have been selected, the leaders in those communities are contacted for a face-to-face interview done by a staff person or volunteer from Lydia’s House.

The second phase involves getting in touch with a contact person in each of these faith communities who has access to the database or listserv with the e-mail addresses of the community members. This contact person is provided with the internet link to our online survey and is asked to send this link out to the faith community. This online survey will allow us to collect information from the community members while allowing them to remain anonymous.

Using the information gathered from the online survey, in addition to the information received in the face-to-face interviews, we will create an educational program to be used in the local faith communities.

Update
We are currently in the process of doing the face-to-face interviews. The online survey has not been distributed yet.

Get Involved
If your faith community would like to participate in the survey project, please contact the Chaplain.