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Meet Donna Bartos of BLOOM365 in West Phoenix

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Donna Bartos.

Donna, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
The commitment to fight for a cause sometimes surfaces months, years or even decades after an adverse experience. Other times, it’s born in an instant to find a solution to a problem. In my case, the path to dedicating my life’s work to preventing the root causes of domestic and sexual violence was a little bit of both.

Shortly after, I left my career as the Executive Director of a local Pennsylvania YWCA affiliate organization to stay home with my two toddlers I began to crave more than Baby Einstein to activate the left and right sides of my brain. A friend introduced me to an emerging network marketing opportunity with Southern Living at Home where I could earn diaper and grocery money while selling home décor items I loved. After a few months of selling pottery, glassware and wrought iron designs from door to door, I earned a trip to the annual sales conference in Nashville. While there, I attended an introductory session to the company’s social responsibility partnership with the national Cut It Out initiative. Cut It Out provides domestic violence advocates with the industry relevant curricula to train salon and spa professionals on how to recognize and respond to the signs of domestic violence and refer clients to help. During the information session, a young woman stood up and shared her story of teen dating abuse and sexual assault as a child. Her story sounded all too familiar and at that moment, I realized that I was one of the ‘silent victims’ she spoke of.

Throughout my high school and early college years, I hid the secret of teen dating abuse, family violence and childhood sexual assault under a facade of excellent grades, over achieving leadership roles and a packed social calendar. Embarrassment, shame, and fear of what people would think or that no one would believe me kept me silent.

On the Southwest flight home from the conference in Nashville, with only a cocktail napkin to write on, I mapped out the vision for mobilizing other stay at home moms to plan and implement brandable “purple” events at salons and spas across the U.S. as a way to inspire and involve a new network of grassroots advocates to help break the silence, break the cycle and save lives. Purple is the color for domestic violence awareness.

One year after the first purple themed Girls Night Out to Cut Out Domestic Abuse salon and spa parties launched, I recruited a working board of directors and Purple Ribbon Council to Cut Out Domestic Abuse was incorporated as a 501c3 charitable organization in Arizona.

From 2006 to 2010, the organization was driven by volunteers and our work centered around growing the salon and spa awareness and fundraising events to support survivors of domestic violence, pilot a camp for orphaned children, and engage community members in grassroots dialogue circles to identify gaps in prevention.

My daylight hours were dedicated to my three young children, meal prep, homework help and kids’ activities and nighttime hours were spent working the organization’s mission and vision – a schedule that made raising funds and cultivating relationships with skilled volunteers challenging and exhausting.

During one of many late nights reading white papers and research studies on best practices for domestic and sexual violence prevention, I sketched out a colorful blooming flower representing healthy relationships stemmed in equality and freedom next to a colorless wilting flower representing abusive and violent relationships stemmed in power and control. Graphic designer Brian Richarson saw through my chicken scratch design and brought the vision to life with the “Are you blooming or wilting?” root cause prevention education tool that drives everything our organization does today.

In 2012, I won the Social Venture Partners Arizona Fast Pitch competition which came with strategic thought partner talent and a $100,000 investment to develop, implement and test a multi-dose curriculum on teen dating abuse prevention and healthy relationship promotion in school health education classes. Two years later, the ASU Morrison Institute for Public Policy evaluated the effectiveness of the new “Bloom It Up” 7-Dose curriculum and determined it is a promising practice strategy for ending teen dating violence.

Shortly thereafter, Purple Ribbon Council began doing business as BLOOM365, I hired our first paid advocate and expanded the curriculum into a comprehensive 3-Step youth-centered education, advocacy, and activism strategy.

Thanks to the generous support of the BLOOM365 board of directors, individuals, foundations, corporations and a growing team of rad advocates, BLOOM365 now educates over 10,000 Arizona teens each year in partner schools and community organizations, provides support groups, crisis counseling and individual advocacy to teens at our new Blooming Point Phoenix site, activates dozens of teens to lead Peer Advocate Crews at school and trains Trusted Adult Allies and teens to best prevent and respond to domestic and sexual violence among youth.

Fast forward 12 years from inception and I am now sleeping better at night and am excited about the trajectory our organization is on through the activation of youth to uproot abuse and cultivate respect, kindness, empathy, equality, consent, safety and peace as the standard for their generation and the next.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Growing our board of directors into a national board, attracting the financial support necessary to sustain and grow BLOOM365 and building our staffing capacity to continue to innovate and train others to replicate our 3-Step model, remain the biggest obstacles and challenges.

To sustain and scale our impact we have developed an earned revenue model and the following fundraising opportunities for individuals and businesses/corporations to invest in our work:

Give Grow BLOOM Tax Credit Campaign-September-December

Get Bloomed Salon & Spa Party- October 27, 2018

Top Golf High School Challenge- February 18, 2019

Bloomin’ Garden Party & Awards- April 2019

“Coin Up, BLOOM Up” Coin/Cash Drives in collaborating retail/consumer based businesses- ongoing

BLOOM365 – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
The need for comprehensive youth-centered violence prevention and intervention is urgent. In each of this year’s tragic school shootings, prior teen dating violence and bullying were strong indicators of the gun violence that followed. Opinions and analysis on the pressing issue of youth and school violence are in abundance. At BLOOM365 all of our education, advocacy, and activism strategies are scalable and are developed by listening to the voices that matter the most- those of the youth and students who have experienced, witnessed or perpetrated emotional, verbal, physical or sexual violence.

BLOOM365 collaborates with schools and community-based youth organizations to cultivate the knowledge, skills and motivate youth to grow safe and healthy relationships, free of power and control based violence (teen dating abuse, sexual/domestic violence, gender-based violence, bullying and gun violence). We do this in three steps:

Step 1: 7-Dose education curriculum
Step 2: Ongoing advocacy through individual and group support
Step 3: Youth-led activisim through the establishment of Peer Advocate Crews at school, awareness and outreach events, policy committees and peer to peer education and advocacy.

School by school, site by site, we educate 10,000 Arizona youth each year about healthy relationships and teen dating abuse prevention, train 100 teen leaders as Peer Advocates and provide direct service advocacy, therapy, and support to over 400 teen survivors to enhance their healing, safety and self-esteem. It is through collaborations with local organizations such as UMOM, Boys and Girls Clubs, one-n-ten, Florence Crittenton and more, that we are able to increase the overall social and emotional health and well-being of youth who have experienced, caused or witnessed violence.

I am most proud that our education, advocacy, and activism work goes beyond increasing awareness on the red flags abuse and making referrals. Our intentionally youth-driven work is disrupting unhealthy social norms that perpetuate violence and is increasing teens’ motivation to cultivate a culture of respect, empathy, kindness, equality, consent, safety and peace.

Teens who have experienced, perpetrated or witnessed dating abuse, domestic violence, sexual violence, and/or gender-based violence often feel isolated, alone and anxious. They are at a higher risk for suicide ideation, substance use, poor academic performance, and depression. They face help-seeking barriers such as stigma, fear of getting themselves or their partner/friend in trouble, fear of being alone, limited knowledge of resources available for teens, and lack of transportation. All of this is preventable.

At the core of all that we do is the unshakable belief that root cause prevention is the cure to ending violence among this generation of youth and the next. We assure that our education, advocacy and activism programs and services remain relevant by training and hiring Lead Peer Advocates, teens who continuously inform and influence our work and help to increase awareness of our services through peer to peer outreach. This is one unique feature of our work and our non-victim blaming, a dynamic and inclusive culture at BLOOM365.

By assuring that the voices, experiences, and influences of young people are amplified throughout our education and supportive services, we are able to uniquely alleviate the stigmas and barriers teens face with reaching out for help, providing them with safe spaces to heal, connect with peers and improve well-being.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
One of the proudest moments of my career is when the doors opened to Blooming Point Phoenix in September 2017 and the BLOOM365 headquarters moved out of my laundry room and into the community.

Another proudest moment was the day a teen boy came up to our advocates after completing our 7-Dose curriculum in his health education class and asked if a “Cholo” who wants to change could attend our Peer Advocate Crew (PAC) meetings. #UprootAbuse

Pricing:

  • Trusted Adult Ally Certification Training $250 bloom365.org/trainings
  • BLOOM365 signature T-Shirts $20 bloom365.org/shop
  • A donation of $35 sponsors one teen through our 7-Dose Bloom It Up Curriculum, bloom365.org/donate

Contact Info:

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