SAFE Alliance in Dire Need of Funding

The woman in the SAFE ATX video stares into the camera and describes the trauma of receiving a forensic exam in a hospital after being raped. 

“There’s the noise, the long waits, the lack of privacy, the feeling that your pain is just one more thing in a long line of other emergencies,” she says. “I’ve been there. I was treated in a crowded emergency room after my rape, terrified, in shock, and the environment made it so much harder. 

“And that’s why Eloise House matters so much,” she continues. “Eloise House was built for survivors – not just as an afterthought. It was not put in a corner of a busy emergency room – but it was a place that was designed, and where the entire environment says, ‘You matter. You deserve care and you deserve dignity.’”

Eloise House was established in 2015 by SAFE Alliance – one of the largest providers of support for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse in the country – to offer forensic exams for survivors of sexual assault. The program and several others run by SAFE Alliance could soon close. In February, SAFE’s Chief Executive Officer Pierre Berastaín warned city leaders that the nonprofit lost $5.6 million in funding over the last year from federal, state, local, and philanthropic sources. According to a city memo released earlier this month, Eloise House will run out of money on May 31. Three other crucial programs could close by October.

Berastaín told the Chronicle that Eloise House provides forensic exams for over 600 people a year, about 95% of those performed in Travis County. He emphasized that practically all of the exams are performed within an hour and a half of a person’s assault, unlike hospitals, where a survivor may wait eight hours or more. And they happen with an advocate at the person’s side, in a warm, relaxing space designed to comfort survivors. 

“Even the examination rooms are very different from what you would see in an emergency room or the hospital – I mean, we have showers with toiletries,” Berastaín said. “And that seems like quite a small thing. But when you’ve gone through a rape, your body is the evidence, your clothes are the evidence – you can’t shower. So after the exam, just to be able to take a shower can be in itself so important. Hospitals don’t provide that.” 

SAFE Alliance has become an indispensable partner to the city and county since its founding in the early 1980s. The city provided the group with close to $4 million last year but reduced that funding by $300,000 for FY 2026. State, federal, and philanthropic funding has declined by about $3.4 million. Berastaín said the organization provides services at a fraction of what they would otherwise cost and that it subsidizes the work of law enforcement, county hospitals, and the state’s Child Protective Services agency.

Waiting room at Eloise House Credit: Courtesy of SAFE Alliance

Berastaín said the group helps do work that would otherwise be done by police with a program called Planet SAFE. Planet SAFE provides a space with an armed security guard to let separated parents safely conduct court-ordered visits with their children, when a judge believes a parent might try to physically assault a child. Berastaín told us SAFE developed the program over a decade ago at the request of county leaders after a father exercising visitation rights kidnapped and murdered his child. He said the program prevents homicides and SAFE provides the services free of charge.  

SAFE also operates SAFE Futures, a program that helps keep children from being placed into foster care during the adjudication of domestic violence cases. Berastaín said that, in these cases, mothers are sometimes charged with failing to protect their children from an abusive father, causing the children to be placed in the state’s foster care system at a cost of thousands of dollars per child to taxpayers.

“Think about it,” Berastaín said. “A mother who might have been abused quite brutally, oftentimes for years, who fears for her life and is about to escape that abuse, is going to the courts now to get custody of the child, and the judge will charge the mother with failure to protect the child. It’s a horrific injustice that happens to survivors of domestic violence. But what SAFE Futures does is, it swoops in and it works directly with the mother of a child to prevent the removal.” 

Planet SAFE and SAFE Futures could close this summer. One of the two shelters that SAFE operates could close this fall. Berastaín said the shelter helps women who have been threatened by their partners with extreme violence. It served more than 500 people in the last year, half of them children. 

“Every single person in our shelters has somebody who is quite literally looking for them, to murder them or cause them extreme harm,” Berastaín said. “As of last week, we had 55 children in the shelter. And if that shelter closes, we will end up in a situation in which every single survivor of domestic and sexual violence and sex trafficking that we have there, and their children, might have to end up on the streets.”

Berastaín said that SAFE Alliance has appealed for emergency funding to U.S. House Reps. Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar, as well as Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. The group is in active talks with Mayor Kirk Watson and City Council members. Watson has held at least two meetings with representatives of the county’s local hospitals, focusing first on keeping Eloise House open. Berastaín said SAFE received $161,000 in donations from local hospitals last year, but estimated that Eloise House has saved them about $6 million in each of its 10 years of existence. 

Berastaín said that SAFE’s employees are worried about their jobs but that their concerns go far beyond their personal employment. He said they see the potential cancellation of SAFE’s programs as “an existential threat to the love and care that they have poured into protecting the safety of the community.” To illustrate the threats, he read summations of two cases he was actively working on, the most recent of the 26,000 contacts that SAFE’s hotline receives each year. In both cases, the survivors reported suffering from repeated sexual and physical assaults, including strangulation. Both had been threatened with murder. Berastaín said he was making calls to find them places in the shelter.

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