Marin Women's Hall of Fame

Donna Garske

Written by Shari Rice, 2003

  
    Circumstances and passion blend together in a unique combination of the ordinary and the exhilarating to motivate and inspire a life of activism in Donna Garske.  For over twenty-seven years, her clear goal has been the betterment of life for women and girls -- battered women and girls specifically -- and in this devoted role of advocate, she has worked with women in the criminal justice system and for the last twenty-two years served as the award-winning Executive Director of Marin Abused Women’s Services (MAWS). Marin is lucky to have her.


  From the flat chill midlands of North Dakota and Minnesota, Donna moved west, eventually bringing to the graceful shores and rolling hills of Marin County the background of family and culture which formed her.  And which also fomented her rebellion from tradition and filled her with ardor and determination, a drive that continues today as she strives to affect changes in the world.


    Born and raised in the Midwest, in a conventional male-led and male-centered family, Donna’s firsthand observation and growing-up experience would subtly prepare her for a career which has focused primarily on taking violence out of the lives of women.


    As a young girl, Donna felt the limiting effects of the old-fashioned cultural attitudes surrounding her.  But early on she wanted more than what was expected of a girl of her time and place.  And wanting more for herself as a woman -- more than the limits of her family’s Midwestern expectations -- she ultimately found herself wanting more for other women.  Through her unflagging support and advocacy over the years, she has been able to merge this intense desire to change her life and to improve women’s lives harmoniously into a career she never expected.


    Sandwiched between four boys, Donna grew up as the only girl in her family, a girl gifted with the keen observation powers to survey the world around her.  In particular, she keyed in on the daily successes of her father and brothers: it seemed they could accomplish whatever they attempted.  While, on the side, she quietly watched them and internally assessed their accomplishments, a small flame of realization began to kindle inside her, the realization that in each person (even in a girl) lay the potential to change someone else’s expectations.


    Despite the traditions around her, she knew that just because she was a female was not a good enough reason to be excluded from an active career and thus the world.  It was also not a reason to merely follow.  And not a reason to let someone else make decisions for her.  And just because she was female it was not a barrier to achieve whatever goal in life she aimed toward.


    And so when teachers, as a matter of course, informed her parents that Donna’s future job choices would probably be limited to teacher or secretary, she resolved to break out of that preconceived trap.  Resolute on escaping the gender role ghetto, she began to blaze her own original trail.


    Starting with a couple of non-traditional jobs, non-traditional, that is, for a girl, Donna entered the working world early.  At eleven and twelve she delivered newspapers.  In high school she pumped gas at the local gas station.  Ridiculed by those around her for working at a “guy’s job,” she even encountered a few male customers who insisted on pumping the gas themselves.  She learned from her position in these jobs to go beyond someone else’s perception.  She had already stepped out of the mold.


    She was further bolstered in her desire for change when she heard a story from a friend: a story of a man who left home to strike out on his own instead of following a predestined path. He told her friend that if he’d done only what others expected of him, he would blame his family for his life.  Instead, he took control himself.  Donna related to that story on a deep level, intuiting that her community and family circumstance were not the environment that would foster the success she wanted.


    Thus determined, like the man in the story, to find her own way, she translated what she’d observed and what she’d discovered into survival skills, skills that would prove useful in the external world, skills that would relate directly to what she does today in her position as the Executive Director of a large organization.


    But it wasn’t only her family background that motivated her to help change society.  Early on, she was struck by a sense of injustice in the Catholic school she attended.  Though she won’t deny that she gained some valuable strengths from her education there, she also became uncomfortably aware of the distinct contradictions between the touted Catholic ideology -- “love one another,” etc. -- and the stark reality of how the people around her really treated each other.  A group of Native American students who were brought to her school one day illuminated this glaring hypocrisy when she saw the contrast between the school’s preaching and teaching versus the way the Native American students were patronized, and thus regarded as less than equals.


    And so after high school, she moved west.

    Why west?


    Specifically, a future in California, she says, remembering one day, in a fifth grade geography class when she found California on the map.


    “I’m going there one day,” she told her friends and, quietly, plans began to germinate.


    First, though, she started at the university in Fargo, North Dakota.  Since she’d finished high school early, halfway through her senior year, after completing one semester in college, she went back to high school for her graduation.  But the west was calling her.


    At first her parents said no.  Too young, they said.  Too many things could happen to a young girl alone, they said.  In a time when girls didn’t leave home, didn’t go to college, didn’t set out for the west coast in the middle of an icy Midwestern winter, why leave now? they said as they watched her pack.


    Though they were frustrated by her decision to leave home, when it finally came time for her to leave, they threw themselves wholeheartedly behind her decision.  In retrospect, Donna’s mother says, it was the best thing her daughter ever did for her life.


    And so with the magnetism of the west drawing her away from the middle of the country, Donna packed her used van with suitcases and furnishings, her two dogs Sadie and Friend, and hauling a stuffed U-haul behind her, she set off with a friend across the country to Oregon.  It would be her first step toward California.


    Donna’s career at the University of Oregon began in the early seventies, a turbulent, thrilling decade for a college student.  Small cafes overflowed with students, sipping strong coffee, cigarette smoke swirling around their heads, as they inflamed each other with ideas, argued and questioned authority, sought answers.  Hoped for a better world.  Made plans how to change it.


    Donna remembers that her own transformation began then, with her own seat in a loud smoky cafe, as one of those students smack in the midst of an inspiring time, pondering the process, generating plans for a better future.


    It wasn’t all a smooth ride, though.  After the death of her father, Donna’s mother was left to raise two children still living at home.  Though it put a strain on the family budget, her mother insisted that her only daughter, finish college.  Never having had the advantage of upper education herself, she took steps to make certain that Donna would.


    For the opportunity to grow and make a change in her life and develop a career Donna credits her mother; for the new direction in her life she credits the feminization she received on campus.


    At the University of Oregon, the Women’s Studies program was a progressive one which helped her put things in perspective, helped her understand her own views and look critically at the world.  The circumstances of the times, along with the innovative Women’s Studies department made her a feminist and changed her, she says, from a “rebel without a clue” to an “activist with a cause.”


    Coming of age in those times, she was part of the first wave of women fortunate enough to take advantage of the contributions of others who earlier had organized and re-birthed the women’s movement.  These women opened up the world to her and taught her a set of matter-of-fact principles that became her operating instructions.  Then as now, she says, what she learned and carries with her daily, is that every woman’s voice counts, that there is no such thing as a dumb question, that every woman can be a leader and that leadership can be shared.


    For Donna, feminism continues to provide a framework for her life, creating a context of understanding and a guide to help her make choices, choices that range from political to spiritual and include social, economic or whatever other choices she needs to make in her life.


    Out of those probing coffee shop moments then, those times of internal and external  exploration and a desire to make a difference came a logical outgrowth: Donna’s decision to explore and participate in public service.


    Helping others, helping herself, helping women.


    Since, for so long, she had been driven to understand herself and the world, she chose Psychology as her college major.  But when she shared her decision with her father, he rolled his eyes and said, “What are you going to do with that the rest of your life?”  And so she decided on Community Service and Public Affairs as a major, with a focus on the criminal justice system.


    She finished college in two and a half years.  In that time she also worked at the Women’s Transitional Living Center, a re-entry program in Eugene.  Piling more onto her schedule, she also needed to complete two internships, a program requirement.  The first one, Job Sponsors, Inc., was in Eugene.  At Job Sponsors, Donna helped inmates after their release from Oregon State prison, working with them on vocational skills, helping them to find jobs.  She also met with “lifers” in the prison itself, helping them with a second program that allowed prisoners to make toys on the inside and sell them on the outside.


    “There were four security checkpoints,” she says of the prison, “and it was a little nerve-wracking, especially when I heard the lock click shut once I was inside.”


    For her second internship, the director of Job Sponsors proposed Donna for a position at Quest, a re-entry program new to San Francisco which sponsored a women’s transitional living center housed in a Pacific Heights mansion.


    After her California interview, Donna went back to Oregon, finished school, packed up her belongings, sold her house and moved again, this time to California where she began her work at Quest.


    Quest was a new program, federally funded and founded to assist women in the criminal justice system.  The program allowed qualified women a twelve-to-eighteen-month early release.  At the Center they were then taught vocational skills, practical and applicable skills they could use to help them integrate back into the community.  Additionally, they were taught skills to help them deal with relationships which focused on issues having to do with family and children.


    Donna’s success during her internship helped her land a paying job to continue at Quest.  But then the times began to change; years of conservative public policy in the criminal justice field took over, the mentality of “lock ‘em up and punish ‘em.”   Punishment instead of reform.  After an enthusiastic beginning, funding was cut for the program and the feeder program from the federal prisons closed down.  For a while Donna worked with the inmates in the San Francisco jail system, but then the Center was finally closed permanently.  Suddenly Donna was out of work.  But she’d inadvertently planned ahead.


    Shortly before the program ended, she’d made a connection with Las Casa de Las Madres, a shelter in San Francisco which started to use the Quest space for their overflow.  Las Casa provided counseling, family-based services and referrals, and also offered a unique situation to battered women and their children: an emergency residential shelter.  The first shelter in the western United States for women experiencing violence, this place for women to feel safe was a totally new concept in the seventies.  In fact, the term “battered women” was a startling phrase in a totally new language that was being used to discuss what was, sadly, not a new experience for women.


    Las Casa’s mission was to offer the opportunity for empowerment to women and children.  They strived to give women and children a chance to know their own strengths so that they could take risks and therefore better control their own lives.  In this way, Las Casa hoped to restore dignity to women, to generate hope, to evoke courage and to help maximize the potential in all their clients.


    While Donna was working with women in the criminal justice system, she noticed that the majority of events that led them to prison were due to their relationships with men.  But once removed from these negative relationships, the women in the new community began to rely on each other instead of the past relationships which had sent them to prison.  They began to support each other, and in doing so helped to bolster themselves as well.


    What struck Donna about these situations was that rather than rely on the criminal justice system to change them, it was the women’s own great personal courage which helped them to change.  After leaving the men who had pulled them into the negative situations, they began to focus on their own careers, their children, their health, their living situations and, most importantly, themselves and their rights.


    Particularly at La Casa, Donna saw and was impressed when these women took action themselves by leaving the batterer.  And they left without knowing what the future would hold.  In the seventies this was a brave and unique step for battered women whose plight up to then had been given little attention or empathy.


    For Donna, facilitating these opportunities soon turned into a new-found career.  Though she’d started by working with both men and women in the prison system, she quickly discovered that prisons weren’t “her cup of tea.”  But working with the women’s programs made her aware of her natural affinity for women’s issues and from then on she concentrated all her efforts on liberating women from the cycle of violence.


    Donna had found her passion.  And in her passion to help women, she became part of a larger movement, a national network of others who worked for the cause in a grassroots way.  Women meeting women.  Women talking and offering a support system to other women.  Networking by spreading and sharing information.  Developing ideas and offering assistance to those who worked in programs to combat violence against women.


    In 1978, to further her education and goals in this arena, Donna completed her Masters degree at Golden Gate University, San Francisco, in Public Administration with a focus on Criminal Justice.  Her career would soon be in full force. While on a forced recuperation from knee surgery, Donna heard about a training session being given for volunteers at Marin Abused Women’s Services, a newly funded program in the County for battered women.  She took the training.


    “I got connected,” she says about MAWS, “and never went home.”


    MAWS, newly founded then in 1977 in response to the escalating domestic violence in Marin County, was a natural match with her drive to help battered women and children.  Established by members of the Marin Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the MAWS system, Donna explains, is a simple one yet at the same time an utterly profound one.

    The tenets are:
    1) That no woman should live in isolation from her experience of being violated.
    2) That women have the right to be free of violence, intimidation and abuse.
    3) That MAWS would play a major role in being a catalyst for change.


    With these principles outlining her similar vision, Donna immediately signed up for training and thus her career with MAWS began.  Beginning as a volunteer in 1979, she quickly earned a paid job as Volunteer Coordinator and in a matter of months, was appointed in 1980 as the new Executive Director.


    At the core of the MAWS program is shelter.  Shelter is number one.  Shelter is necessary for women who enter the program.


    And where do the women come from?  They come to MAWS through women’s support groups, through advocacy or legal referrals or through the all-important port-of-entry into the organization: the hotline.


    Along with offering emergency shelter and comfort to battered women, MAWS also works as an agent of change in the community, a force to help change the mindset of male superiority engendered in our society.  This mindset, this superior way of thinking, is what gives men the belief that they have the right to inflict violence.  They are superior.  They can do what they want.


    And so twenty years ago, MAWS set up a Men’s Program, the first in the country, one which provides a hotline and one which teaches male batterers new behaviors, support and advocacy to help stop their violence.  The men who complete the program are dedicated to the principles of non-violence and are grateful, not only for changing their behavior but grateful for the freedom they feel when their own violent behavior finally ends.


    How does someone who works in this field, especially a woman, have compassion for the men who beat their loved ones -- the shelter residents that MAWS harbors and tries to protect?


    “By refusing to give one’s life energy to something you hate.  And by having a compassion for an individual and an understanding for a behavior,” Donna says, “that someone is not born with but which one learns either through their immediate surroundings or from our society in general.”


    “No one started out with an outlook of superiority,” she says, and at MAWS, not only do they offer an intervention solution in the community but also a strategic alliance to let other men know that this behavior is not okay and that it can be changed.  In her years at MAWS Donna has led the way in the movement with innovative responses to men’s violence against women.  This includes one of the first transitional housing programs for battered women, for which she earned an award from the American Planning Association in 1983.  She also established an education program for batterers which has been replicated on an international scale.


    Over a three-year period, Donna helped to develop Europe’s first batterers’ program.  She also worked with the Network of East-West Women (NEWW), providing them with technical assistance for their program which supports domestic violence programs in Eastern/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.


    It has been a time filled with satisfying and exhilarating experiences.  Since Donna’s nearly thirty-year involvement in this emerging world for women, she has seen a huge change.  It has been exciting for her to see the changes made, to observe the unfolding consciousness, to see the finger pointing at this global problem.  At the Beijing Conference in the nineties, for example, the main focus of the entire conference was the eradication of violence against women and girls.


    And Donna has been a key player in it all.  Her work has created widespread benefits for women’s causes and has helped to shape and influence the unwavering impression that domestic violence is NOT okay.  Her advocacy efforts have even influenced legislation, specifically the Federal Violence Against Women Act as well as AB-226, a California law she co-authored which establishes minimum requirements for batterers’ programs.  She also co-founded California Alliance Against Domestic Violence, the statewide coalition.


    In 1992 she guided MAWS in creating ”Transforming Communities: Creating Safety and Justice for Women and Girls” as a learning center for preventing violence against women and girls, a center which has been recognized as a model approach by the National Academy of Sciences.


    What makes a person like Donna?  A person so dedicated and one who cares so deeply?


    Donna says that you must begin by finding that place in yourself, that place which relates to your own passionate issue.  Find all the different ways to understand it, all the different ways to have a conversation about it.


    To young girls she would say, “Follow your passion.”


    Donna’s own passion and expertise led her to be selected as a 1995 National Gimbel Foundation Child and Family Scholar.  In this role, she explored new approaches to preventing family violence.  Her resulting article, “Transforming the Culture: Creating Safety, Equality and Justice for Women and Girls,” was published in Preventing Violence in America in 1996, and provided a framework of prevention for the domestic violence field.


    At MAWS Donna founded a technical assistance and resource center, which is now a national project moving across the nation.  For over seven years this program of prevention has been dedicated to the crisis end of the continuum, and today even the CDC (Center for Disease Control) is looking at domestic violence as a social disease.


    That year her article was published, she was also appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Prevention Professionals and Advocates.


    Because of Donna’s efforts and those of others like her, thousands of lives have been saved.  Today, over two thousand shelters exist nationwide and countless more internationally. Many state and national laws have been passed on behalf of battered women and their children.  These laws uphold the unequivocal right to live free of violence in society.  But social change, as an organic process, necessarily continues.  “Everything grows,” Donna says, “because it receives attention and care.”


    Therefore, the work in this arena must not slow down.  It must not end.  Violence against women continues still, and girls today experience abuse at an even younger age than ever before.


    Violence against women cannot be considered one single issue.  It is more than that.  It is the way people act, how they react, simple yet complex daily interactions.  Add in the media.  Add in the Internet.  All are contributors to the upsurge in sexism and violence today that extends beyond the movie screen, beyond explicit song lyrics or what we can be found on the computer.


    In our patriarchal structure, where men are still so powerful, it’s not surprising to find that ninety-five percent of domestic violence is committed against women by men.  Since men’s violence is believed by MAWS not to be innate, but to be a learned behavior, then it is also believed that it can be changed.


    Change also the status of women today by raising their status -- an obvious and one of the best ways to free women’s lives from violence.


    And how to accomplish that change in women’s status? Education, of course, is always a step toward change.  By educating the public against gender role conditioning, the awareness that begets change will begin.  Before negative societal situations can be changed, people must be aware of them and how they impact individuals’ lives.


    Visualize living in a box.


    This exercise, called “Living in a Box,” is one that Donna facilitates for young boys and girls: She tells the young people to actually visualize living in a box and by doing so, they will no doubt recognize “the box” that girls live in today in our society.


    They must be thin.
    They must be pretty.
    They must be attentive.
    But where do these images lead?


    “To the collapse of their souls and a loss of confidence in themselves,” Donna says.


    According to Donna, almost eighty-five percent of all teenage girls in the United States are currently dieting, if not on their plates, then in their minds.   They don’t necessarily need to deprive themselves of food to be “dieting,” but only to hold the awareness that they should deprive themselves of food in order to succeed in our society.


    Despite their “dieting,” almost one hundred percent of these girls still believe they’re not perfect.  Perfect, that is, according to society’s unrealistic standards.  To go against these ridiculous, fashion-magazine “ideals,” girls need self-confidence -- the only way to stand up for themselves against present and future violence.


    Today one out of three girls suffers from abuse and by the time they are eighteen, one out of four girls will suffer from sexual abuse.  By standing up for themselves, by not putting up with the endangerment of their minds and bodies, the hope is that abuse will eventually dwindle.


    To move these changes along, both boy and girl teens alike must gain the skills to think critically about the whole gender experience: who’s who and why.  Teens need to find their own means of true expression, even if it goes against traditional expectations.  This is not a license to engage in destructive behavior, but a constructive freedom to stand up for their beliefs.  To go the distance for those beliefs.  To take a risk.  And to be a leader.


    “Leadership,” Donna says, “is being out there.  Sometimes it can mean being isolated.”


    And since this role goes against a woman’s natural tendency to be relational, girls and women both don’t easily leap to the role of leader.  But a girl or a woman needs to find her own version of leadership, not society’s version.  Donna has found her own version by a looking as objectively as possible at herself, at her own “dragons,” and then dealing graciously with the difference between her and those she works with.  By seeing the world in a more holistic way and by leaving herself open for discovery, Donna Garske has become a compassionate leader.   To all women, Donna says, “Live outside the patriarchal mindset.  By being a happy woman, you will free your internal soul.”


    Donna Garske, advocate and spokesperson for women, is a product of many different converging social and individualized experiences.  Today she stands out as a leader who heads one of our society’s most important causes.  And she urges others to participate, too, to take on the role of activist and to use that activism as a tool to carry through life, a tool which can help others, especially those who are victims.


    Donna says that to be an activist one must visualize change and, as Donna says, encourage others to “Believe in change.”  Be optimistic.  Not unrealistic but hopeful and driven.


    What does the future hold for Donna Garske?


    To continue her work.  To engage her passion.  She wants her work to go on and hopes that the next generation will be there to “pick up the cause.”  But her most fervent goal of all is that there be no cause -- the cause of freeing women from violence. When this happens, MAWS will be out of business because its work will finally be done.


    Yours Toward Safety & Justice For All,

Donna Garske, Executive Director
Marin Abused Women's Services
734 A Street
San Rafael, CA 94901
(ph )415/457-2464 x 27
(fax) 415/457-6457