Leslie Linder, M.Div: "I find if you stand still long enough you can see all sorts of amazing things come to pass.”

“Our strengths make each of us uniquely qualified to help others,” says Leslie Linder, NextStep’s Child Protective Liaison/Community Educator, referring to her coworkers. Leslie has seen many staff changes and much growth during her 20 years of service. Having experienced domestic violence in her youth, the cause is something she has been passionate about for her entire life.

Leslie has a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from Wayne State College and a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt University. However, before she came to NextStep she wasn’t sure how she wanted to use her education. “I was at crossroads, I guess. I’ve always liked to get a jump on everything, including my mid-life crisis.”

After college Leslie completed a chaplaincy internship at EMMC (looking at community ministry through the UUA) and worked as an assistant paralegal while she looked at career path options. Both of these experiences helped to prepare her for her introduction to advocacy. In 2001, a job posting by NextStep caught her eye. She applied and was hired to be Community Response Coordinator, educating the local faith community and other professionals about domestic violence. So began her career helping survivors.

“Like ministry, I believe advocacy is a vocation. My father was a United Methodist minister, and I admired his work. That was why I prepared for that role, myself. Yet, the work of NextStep is ultimately a better fit for me.”

“When I started at NextStep, we only served Hancock County and generally we had three to five employees along with a roster of very dedicated volunteers,” Leslie recalls. [We now have 18-20 paid staff and about 30 volunteers.]  “We had one online computer that was connected to the fax line, so we all took turns checking e-mails. We had no shelter and relied on trained community members to put people up for a week or so at a time in their own homes. Community response was important just to let people know we were there.”

As Community Response Coordinator, Leslie worked to bring basic information about domestic violence and NextStep services to community organizations such as churches, hospitals, and paramedics. She also was involved in a Hancock County domestic violence task force and helped deliver domestic violence core training to law enforcement recruits at the Criminal Justice Academy.

Leslie remembers when David Kee, a founding attorney of Fellows, Kee, Tymoczko & Lewis in Bucksport, took on NextStep as a “from the heart” project, providing legal services from an old desk stuck into the NextStep childcare room. “Once we were able to offer legal services and David really began increasing the access survivors had to the courts, everything changed--even though he to trip over teddy bears and squeaky toys to get to his yard-sale file cabinet.”

Later, Leslie took on other roles at NextStep. “I did our school-based education for two or three years. During that time, our territory expanded when Washington County was added to our service area. There were two of us [youth educators] who each covered a county’s worth of schools.”

In 2006, in collaboration with the Maine Coalition Against Domestic Violence (MCEDV) and the State of Maine, NextStep added Child Protective Services Liaison services, as did the other MCEDV member programs. Leslie has been doing this work ever since.

“At first our role was to be co-located at DHHS offices and to consult with both survivors and caseworkers on CPS (Child Protective Services) assessments. It was a triage type of thing.  Over time advocates became more of a part of the OCFS (Office of Child and Family Services) team, though we remain employees of the domestic violence programs. We now often work with survivors and caseworkers on a longer-term basis, giving education and support to parents who have child welfare cases up to and including reunification custody cases.”

“Both disciplines [child welfare and domestic violence intervention] have distinct core values. Through our collaboration we’ve done much to navigate a path allowing us to maintain those values and respecting our differences. We all have safety as a goal. How we go about it sometimes syncs up, sometimes dovetails, and sometimes diverges. In all cases we rely on our relationships to figure things out.”

“There are some key differences in how our agencies work, and both are necessary. For example, NextStep is often a sort of safety net for people whose lives change greatly when they engage with systems like OCFS or the courts. Given our core mission and services, an agency like NextStep has no time limits and can be used by people for years and years if they want and need this,” Leslie explains. “DHHS, however, has strict timeframes that must remain in place, often for very good reasons, such as child safety and the due process rights of parents. Since they can move fast, there are hard timeframes built into the laws that guide their work, which is not always conducive to peeling back the layers of trauma, risk, and vulnerability at play in domestic violence cases. This realization has led to many adaptations of DHHS/OCFS policies. In our collaboration we have had feedback into many of these changes.”

Leslie also remains an educator. “I’ve taken part in the orientation training for caseworkers statewide for many years. We’ve offered annual trainings on advanced topics on subjects such as partnering with survivors, offender accountability, high risk/non-lethal strangulation cases, and good documentation of domestic violence. The opportunity for advocates to be a part of this is fairly unique to the work we do here in Maine.”

In 2017 Leslie was part of a team of OCFS supervisors and advocates that went to the annual conference of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) to deliver a training about the collaboration opportunities available between domestic violence and child welfare agencies. “Learning what was going on nationally was just one more very clear example of how rare our collaborative work is. Though not perfect, it is a path-making venture and the people engaging in the teams always approach our attempts with earnestness and genuine concern for the work. I find if you stand still long enough you can see all sorts of amazing things come to pass.”

In her personal life Leslie writes narrative non-fiction about spirituality and feminism, as well as occasional (allegedly) fictional forays into the horror genre (finding these topics not as divergent as they may at first appear). Her columns run in every issue of the SageWoman Magazine and her next book, Spinstress Craft: Magick for Independent Womxyn is on Amazon now and due out in July through Llewellyn Press.