Through Conway’s Starting Point, Suzette Indelicato assists more than 600 victims of domestic violence each year, and reaches 1,200 students. (Photo: David Lazar)
From the time she was a youngster growing up in rural Maine, Bartlett’s Suzette Indelicato has been an outspoken champion for those who couldn’t always speak up for themselves. So when Indelicato became a preschool teacher and one morning invited a volunteer from a local support group for victims of domestic violence to speak to her students, the connection was instant, and lasting.
“I was always the type of kid in middle school and high school who’d stick up for the kids being bullied,” she says. “I was also raised in a home where volunteering was very important. When I learned about Starting Point, I thought, ‘Wow! That’s quite an organization.’” In the Conway-based Starting Point, Indelicato, herself, found a new beginning. She became a volunteer, assisting with the nonprofit’s 24-hour hotline, visiting with alleged assault victims in the hospital, speaking to classes, offering a new path forward. Fourteen years later, Indelicato, 40, is Starting Point’s executive director, overseeing an organization that annually assists more than 600 victims in Carroll County, providing counseling, public outreach and education, court advocacy, shelter, and in some instances, relocation.
Starting Point has come a long way from its own launch 29 years ago, when a half dozen founding mothers began operating a home-based hotline for women and children in abusive situations. With the partnership of police, educators and local hospitals, it blossomed into an organization that today boasts five full-time staffers and 28 volunteers (retirees, schoolteachers, clergy, and stay-at-home moms, some former victims themselves), a newly expanded shelter, and offices in Conway and Ossipee. It is among 14 agencies statewide working collaboratively through the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. “For many of these volunteers, this is their way of giving back,” Indelicato says.
In a rural county like Carroll where population is sparse and many homes seasonal, that can mean meeting a victim at a local post office because he or she is without a landline, cell phone or neighbor, or there’s just one car in the family. It can mean visiting a hospital at 1am to counsel someone who’s been assaulted, and then returning to work at 8am. It can mean finding someone a hotel room on Christmas Eve, because there’s nowhere to go and the shelter is full. “The violence these people experience impacts their lives in a major way,” Indelicato says. “I want them to feel that a person who truly cares listened to them, that they have more choices than when they came to us, and that they know they have a place they can go. It’s an honor to do this work.” For more information, visit www.startingpointnh.org.
