A Successful Feminist Shelter: A Case Study of the Family Crisis Shelter in Hawaii

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Abstract
Feminist-run shelters for battered women seek both to provide protection for these women and to empower them with a critique of the society that promotes violence and male domination. Largely because of difficulties in obtaining funding, however, in the U.S. the trend has been for such shelters to be coopted into conventional social service agencies. This article presents a case study of the Family Crisis Shelter in Hawaii, which has retained its feminist program and continues to promote societal change despite its financing by governmental and conventional funding sources. The author attributese this shelter's relative success to its particular empowerment strategy, which primarily depends on staffing by nonprofessional former shelter residents and its policy of providing nonjudgmental support for its residents.