From the Director’s Desk, January 8, 2025

Daryl Fox: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the January 8, 2025, installment of From the Director’s Desk. We’re glad you’re able to join us today. All audio lines are muted as this is a listen-only briefing. For reference, this recording will be posted on Friday to the OVC website. So at this time, it’s my pleasure to introduce Kristina Rose, OVC Director, for today’s briefing.

Kristina Rose: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining my final From the Director’s Desk. I want to use this time to share some of my thoughts on the last 4 years at OVC. It’s really 3 and a half, but I’m going to count it as 4.

I just returned last night from a trip to the site of the truck attack in New Orleans, and went from there to Uvalde to mark the beginning of OVC’s Antiterrorism and Emergency Response Grant that will be funding services and support for victims and survivors of the tragedy at Robb Elementary School. In New Orleans, I had a chance to spend time with the FBI team that was there getting ready to set up the family assistance center. They’re working closely with all of the partners there in New Orleans, and I’m just indebted to the FBI Victim Services Division and their Emergency Response team, as well as the New Orleans Family Justice Center, the VOCA State Administering Agency there in, I believe in Baton Rouge, and many other partners who are assisting the victims and survivors in New Orleans as we speak. It is a noble effort.

While in Uvalde, I had the privilege of meeting with some of the families and the individuals directly impacted by the tragedy there and was able to tour the beautiful murals depicting the children and the teachers who lost their lives there. They were so personal and vibrant. I’m really, really glad I had a chance to go to Uvalde before the end of this Administration. I had been once before, but it was important for me to go back.

When I first came on board at OVC in July of ‘21, I shared that my priorities would be on options, access, and information. Though they seem like such simple concepts—and they are—they are also quite powerful. These priorities have inspired many of the funding opportunities we’ve released and the initiatives we’ve introduced.

One of those was the revision of the Crime Victim Compensation Guidelines, an effort to expand access to and eligibility for crime victim compensation, especially in marginalized and underserved communities. We came so close, but frankly, there wasn’t enough time left in the Administration to get them over the finish line. 

When I made the phone call that I dreaded to the executive directors and presidents of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators and National Association of Crime Victim Compensation Boards to let them know, they graciously reminded me that not all was lost, and they gave me some examples. 

One was that the process of revising the guidelines spurred a national conversation about crime victim compensation that may not have happened otherwise. Two, some states had already made changes to their guidelines that aligned with the new rule in anticipation of its release. And lastly, I learned that some states have instituted regular conversations on compensation as a result of the proposed rule to discuss the issues and challenges of expanding compensation access and eligibility. It gave me hope to know that the conversations, debates, and changes to policy on crime victim compensation will continue into the future.

Another initiative that made me very proud was the creation of the Victim Advocacy Corps, a program that trains college-level students from minority-based institutions to be victim advocates, and then places them in communities to use the skills that they’ve learned. This innovative program is administered by the National Organization on Victim Advocacy, and they were able to introduce their first cohort of students at their conference in DC this past year, and I’ve gotten to know some of them. That was such a phenomenal moment! The Corps is a strategic investment that OVC made in the future of the victim advocacy, and I know it will pay dividends for years to come.

Another exciting program is the one we created to build the national capacity of peer-to-peer support programs. OVC invested $2 million into a project to either create or expand peer support programs that are both culturally and linguistically tailored to meet the unique needs of specific survivor populations, especially for survivors of those crimes for which existing support does not currently meet their needs. The National Center for Victims of Crimes has this award, and they are making great progress.

One of my favorite initiatives has been an effort to form new relationships with non-traditional partners as a way of expanding access to crime victim services. 

We chose to focus our efforts on funeral directors. You’ve heard me talk about this many times, but we learned that in many communities, funeral directors may be the only service provider a surviving family comes in contact with in the aftermath of homicide. 

As you know, crime victim compensation provides reimbursement for funeral expenses of homicide victims, so many funeral directors are already familiar with the program. But they may not be familiar with the other services and resources for families of homicide victims, like grief counseling, peer support, and other out-of-pocket expenses that can be reimbursed with crime victim comp. 

So, we embarked on a campaign to engage funeral directors across the country to be a bridge to services for families of homicide victims. In the process, we learned of the enormous challenges that many of them face with crime victims comp. It was astonishing. So, we held a listening session, we gave presentations at their conferences, we published in their professional magazines, and we met with the leadership of their membership organizations. This has led to the development of extremely valuable relationships with these professionals and a new understanding of how integral their roles are in reaching persons impacted by crime.

Some of the initiatives that we started at OVC were born out of necessity. As we witnessed the decrease in the CVF balance, which in turn impacted the CVF annual cap—CVF, obviously, I’m referring to the Crime Victims Fund—we knew that local organizations serving crime victims were hurting for financial support. 

To address this problem, OVC issued a solicitation to provide supplemental funding to communities for the basic needs of survivors, including food, shelter, transportation, and others. To make it easier for community organizations to apply, we simplified the grant process and offered options like submitting a video or giving an oral presentation to a grant manager rather than a written project description. This was so well-received, I think we broke JustGrants. It resulted in a record number of applications and peer reviewers to score them all. In the end, we funded about 27 applications, but because there were so many viable applications, we’re hoping to fund more of those with our FY 25 funding. 

Several new tools were developed since 2021 to improve the grant application and management process. We expanded our Tribal Financial Management Center to accommodate human trafficking grantees and then further expanded it to serve all grantees. We released IMPROVE, a free survey instrument that grantees can use to measure the quality of their victim services. We released data dashboards for state administrators and Tribal grantees so they can access and analyze their own performance management data—and this month, we’re releasing one of our anti-trafficking efforts. We started taking the staff behind these programs on the road to work one-on-one with grantees and from what I’ve heard, that has made all the difference.

We took a new approach with technical assistance and funded a TA provider to provide TA to the TA providers! We held our first all-TA Provider conference and are in the process of developing guiding principles to help steer and support our TA efforts.

We developed an entire series of Child Victim and Witness Support Materials which offer creative, interactive, and free materials to assist children and youth, and the caregivers and professionals who help them. We also established a grant program to pay for the printing of these materials, as we know that printing budgets for many organizations are nearly non-existent. 

After years of feedback from the field, OVC, in collaboration with our colleagues at the Office of Trafficking in Persons at HHS, also began a historic joint effort to develop standards of care for anti-trafficking service providers to promote uniform service standards that will ensure consistent quality of care and reduce potential harm to trafficking survivors. 

Something that’s challenging for any type of funding organization is keeping up with the trends in new and emerging victimization issues. One of those emerging issues for us was online harassment and abuse. To address it, in FY 2023, OVC made three awards to address online harassment and abuse, including one to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, their Image Abuse Helpline, to expand their hours and their capacity to serve even more victims.

Under our Advancing Hospital-Based Victim Services program, OVC has made dozens of awards totaling more than $13 million to implement and expand hospital-based programs to support crime victims. This is a special program because it ensures that trained victim service providers are on hand in hospital emergency rooms to connect victims of violence in underserved communities with the services and the support that they need to aid in their healing. Hospital-based programs are a significant component of community violence intervention work, and OVC made considerable inroads in infusing consideration of and conversation around victim service provision in OJP’s Community Violence Intervention and Prevention initiative. This included managing victim service-focused awards under the OJP-wide CVI solicitation and participating significantly to the coordination and content of the two national conferences with planning for a third underway. OVC also awarded more than $11 million to serve victims within CVI organizations.

In FY 2022, OVC awarded $5 million to Equal Justice Works through the Legal Services and Victims’ Rights Enforcement for Underserved Communities program to mobilize a cohort of 21 attorney Fellows and law students to be hosted by organizations in underserved communities across the Nation, to provide civil legal services to victims of crime, and to enforce their rights.

As I’m taking stock of our accomplishments at OVC, I have to mention OVC’s Communities of Color Working Group. This is an internal group of hard-working individuals who proactively created the group to increase access for organizations that serve communities of color across the country. They are responsible for the solicitation that created our first national center for culturally specific services. They organized OVC internal book clubs to discuss how to have conversations about race and organized internal training sessions for OVC staff and leadership to enhance their knowledge and skills in understanding unconscious bias and for improving access for historically marginalized communities. 

One of my favorite things has been our work with the Tribes. Since FY 2021, OVC has hosted 11 Tribal Consultations on the Tribal Set-Aside from the Crime Victims Fund. Our Tribal Division piloted a new approach this year—or last year, and again this year—to alleviate the struggle that some remotely located tribes experience with applying for grants, which involved deploying grant managers from our Tribal Division to Alaska to assist Alaska Village grant applicants with creating program designs and project budgeting. 

During my time as Director, we also did our best to increase OVC’s presence in the victim services field. It was important to us to hold as many in-person convenings as we could. We organized annual VOCA Administrators conferences, two huge Indian Nations Conferences, multiple regional tribal gatherings, and launched the very first mass violence summit just this past year.

In 2022, OVC’s National Crime Victims’ Rights Week commemoration events were held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a very first for OVC, and we brought back OVC’s candlelight vigil, an event I am especially proud of.

For the first time, OVC held a symposium during NCVRW that engaged survivor leaders on criminal justice reform. We invited leaders of the field of criminal justice reform, victim services, and other disciplines to hear from survivor leaders on important criminal justice reform issues, like alternatives to incarceration, restorative justice, and responses to gun violence. Due to the survivors’ vulnerability and candor on these policy issues, attendees left with a new, or at least a revived, understanding of the value that survivor leaders bring to the criminal justice reform discussion. 

Other efforts to raise awareness of victim services and what we’re doing here at OVC included the debut of From the Director’s Desk, [the] monthly briefing for the field held the second Thursday of every month. We’ve hosted 28 briefings that average 100 real-time listeners—I think we actually have a little more today—and 235 YouTube views per episode. I really am going to miss these.

OVC marked the 40th anniversary of the Victims of Crime Act with a year-long commemoration of four decades of acknowledging crime victims’ experiences with the criminal justice system and enhancing services for survivors of crime as they seek physical, financial, and emotional healing. 

OVC also hosted a 20th Anniversary Commemoration of OVC’s Anti-Trafficking Programs in the Department of Justice’s Great Hall. The theme was Collaboration, Transformation, and Impact, which highlighted OVC’s grantees’ impact on the lives of thousands of trafficking survivors over two decades of OVC funding, assistance, and support. 

Folks, all of this—and I haven’t even yet acknowledged the amount of effort that went into our VOCA comp and assistance programs since I started. They delivered $4.6 billion in victim assistance funds and $1.4 billion in compensation claims, serving more than 20 million new victims. In addition, we awarded $176 million in discretionary funds, $42.4 million in support for the victim response to mass violence, and $365 million in anti-trafficking awards. 

Through it all, transparency has been the hallmark of my time here at OVC. Sometimes that was the only thing we could offer, especially when the CVF balance was at its lowest and we weren’t sure what the future of the Fund would be. 

I’m happy to report that the Fund is at its healthiest point in a long time right now, with a total of $4.1 billion in the fund. Although about $1.9 billion is still being held due to the ongoing litigation, it still leaves plenty of funding for FY 25, and OVC does not intend to take its foot off the pedal. OVC will continue providing awareness, education, and transparency on the Crime Victims Fund for as long as we are able.

It would take a week-long special edition of From the Director’s Desk to list all the accomplishments made possible by the OVC staff over the past 4 years. It would take another week just to express my deep gratitude, love, and appreciation for the OVC staff. I have never worked with a more collegial, supportive, bright, and mission-focused group of individuals in my entire career. For those of you who manage organizations, you know how rare this is and how grateful we are when it happens. 

And if I’m truly being honest with myself, it’s been the victims, survivors, and their family members that have kept me going since I took this seat in 2021. I have been able to meet so many of you—under tragic circumstances and under celebratory circumstances. As many of you have witnessed, I am often moved to tears not only because of the losses you have endured, but by the exceptional strength and the hope that you bring to this work. 

I remember speaking at the Parents of Murdered Children Conference this past year, having traveled there from our first conference on mass violence, which was quite heavy, as you can imagine. I was feeling especially vulnerable and weak while giving my lunchtime remarks, and in true Kris Rose fashion, I told the audience this. At first there was silence, and then came the most supportive outpouring of applause. It’s times like those when the voices and the actions of survivors have lifted me and carried me through some really tough moments.

In closing, I’ll leave you with a quote, which I included in my remarks at the amazing Indian Nations Conference on the ancestral lands of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. 

I am Jewish, and there is an important figure in Jewish thought named Abraham Joshua Heschel. He coined a term called “radical amazement,” meaning, just to be alive is a miracle. He believes thinking, breathing, moving, acting, and talking are all miraculous. He said:

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement ... to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

Thank you for sharing this incredible 4-year journey with me. And please accept my heartfelt thanks for all that you do to help victims and survivors find their justice. Thank you.