Crisis Response: Catalyst for Innovation

During the COVID-19 pandemic, innovation has been critical to keeping many people's lives and workplaces functioning safely. For example, at the height of the pandemic, Chris Newman, the FVPSA state administrator for Massachusetts, and a team of professionals took their innovative ideas and developed a plan to help domestic violence survivors and their advocates through FVPSA American Rescue Plan (ARP) funding.

"We'd already been doing some COVID mitigation strategies in Massachusetts," Newman said. "Still, we felt some missing components, specifically in 23 FVPSA core-funded, and ARP-funded sexual assault and domestic violence programs within congregate care and shelter settings, so part of the rollout included surveillance testing."

Last year, FVPSA allocated $12.4M in ARP funds to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS), Department of Public Health, and various other state organizations to support the continuity of care for survivors, which included starting surveillance testing in August 2020. The service was made available to congregate care staff and survivors who voluntarily consented to a polymerase chain reaction or PCR testing and rapid testing when available. The goal was to effectively monitor community or population-level disease outbreaks or characterize the incidence and prevalence of the disease. "We wanted to get a pulse or a baseline on what the COVID numbers were in the congregate care and shelter settings, especially in what we knew from science that those types of settings were at high risk for spread."

Despite the multiple COVID-19 variants, such as delta and omicron, being introduced into the population, the surveillance testing plan resulted in 1.1 million tests, which allowed the state to register a low 2.13% positivity rate since September 2020. Newman attributes the historic ARP funding and a desire to make a difference in survivors' lives to the effort's success. "To be able to use these ARP funds and maintain sheltering survivors in their congregate care settings versus having to either hotel or motel them and or in some cases get them into extended-stay apartments was important. We ended up providing peace of mind and stability for more than 18,000 survivors in their time of need."

The next evolution includes using FVPSA ARP COVID-19 funds and continuing to push innovation to bring mobile health units and vaccine support for survivors in Massachusetts. For additional information regarding FVPSA ARP grants, visit our program instructions page.