SPEND TEN MINUTES TALKING TO JAN LANGBEIN AND YOU’LL WANT TO TAKE OUT YOUR
CHECKBOOK. Not out of guilt, mind you; she doesn’t proselytize. Her appeal is a clear, steady,one-woman-at-a-time type of passion that comes from knowing that tomorrow, at least three women across the country will be killed by an abusive partner and don’t we all have an obligation to do something about it?
But, as she’ll tell you, back in the late 1980’s things were very different for her. Never having known domestic violence herself—happily married to her construction contractor husband, a stay-at-home mother of two, and a mildly dedicated Junior League member, she’d been weighing a couple easy placements that would fulfill her service requirement to the volunteer organization.
“One day I stopped into a salon to have a nail fixed, and saw this magazine article that said every 12 seconds a woman is abused,” she says. At that moment, she knew she needed to find a place where she could help these women. Not to make good on an obligation, but to make a difference.
She selected the Genesis Women’s Shelter at random, immersing herself answering phones, filing, making Kool-Aid for children’s snack time, holding newborns. “I didn’t know domestic abuse looked like this. People who looked like me, who are educated like me.
Domestic abuse looks like everybody: short, tall, fat, thin, black, white.”
After four years of volunteering, she was sitting in a meeting where it was announced the shelter needed a new executive director, someone who would raise money and run the place. “I blurted out: ‘That sounds like me,’” says Jan, with all the energy she had that day back in 1991.
When she took over, the shelter had 14 employees and a budget of $400,000. Now there are 68 staff members and a budget of three million, all from private donations and grants, to care for the 700 women and children a year who seek refuge at Genesis—in addition to the 2000 women who use the shelter’s outreach program.
“I wouldn’t have interviewed me,” she says of her resume at the time, adding that she bet a lot of people at the shelter must have scratched their heads that the place had gone and hired the Tuesday morning volunteer. Her family had close to the same reaction. Would she still be home to cook dinner, they wanted to know? No, she told them. And according to her, they all turned out the better for it.
Her husband has been by her side for every event, and raising her daughters around Genesis gave them valuable perspective early on.
When you ask her about her success, she’ll tell you that she never knew enough to think she couldn’t do it. But any kind of back-patting is immediately brushed off, as her focus returns always and fully to the facility she runs.
“My job description has always been to dream the dream,” she says, crediting the Junior League with teaching her a lot about how nonprofits work, and the work itself for revealing what these women need. The facility has developed what she calls a continuum of care: after-school programs, divorce advice, and even long-term housing, so they can provide assistance beyond the initial six-week limit.
In 1998, the shelter expanded its facilities to house women and children for up to a year and a half, in hopes of helping them break the abuse pattern permanently. She considers everyone she meets a potential donor or volunteer, calling them for a check, to provide plants for the landscaping, or to help get matching bedspreads in all the rooms. “Dallas is a very can-do city,” she says, but acknowledges it takes a lot of effort to get the community behind them. “I’m always working it. I look at it like I’m giving people the opportunity to be part of a special place. At least that’s how I psych myself up.”
Faced with intense human drama on a daily basis, Jan is calm but never unmoved. “One day I was late for carpool, grabbing my briefcase, and a woman said ‘I need to thank you. You saved my life today. He was going to kill me and my children today.’ That’s a great day at the office. I get to see women of courage grab their children and start a new life.”
But as long as the shelter is still necessary, there will be bad days as well. “My heart aches every day for the 200 women on our waiting list. That’s what bothers me. We keep asking them to hang on a little bit longer.”
Jan Langbein
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