The Family Place‘s Texas Trailblazer Awards Luncheon VIP reception at the Hilton Anatole’s Wedgwood Room was abuzzing with three stars on Friday, October 4. It was no wonder with keynote speaker Justin Baldoni against the sponsors board, with guests lined up for a photo opp. Despite his killer good looks, it was his charismatic personality that drew guests like a magnet collecting paper clips.
Over on the far side of the room among the arriving guests, others were drawn to former Family Place CEO Paige Flink Iconic Awardee Jamie Williams, former Family Place CEO Paige Flink, Betty Regard, Mary Bowman Campbell with Jimmy Heimpel, Harold Ginsburg, Caren Prothro, Carol Seay, Joyce Goss and Susan Scullin. In between Justin’s lineup and the folks surrounding Jamie was 2024 Texas Trailblazer Awardee Dr. Opal Lee, seated at a table looking thrilled over the guests of all ages wanting selfies with the “Grandmother of Juneteenth.”
Right on schedule, guests moved into the Chantilly Ballroom for the luncheon with The Family Place CEO Tiffany Tate welcoming guests and introducing Paige, who along with Tiffany presented Jamie with her Iconic Award. They were followed by Co-Chairs Lauren Black, Nakita Johnson, Clarisa Lindenmeyer and Lauren McKinnon. It was during their welcome that a slight shift in focus took place, recognizing the importance of men stepping up to battle domestic violence. To highlight this point, it was announced that former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings would serve as honorary chair of the newly formed Men Ending Domestic Violence Auxiliary Group.
After a brief break, with the room of guests rising to their feet applauding, 97-year-old Opal was brought to the stage to receive the Texas Trailblazer Award. Her message was brief but succinct: “I just need to leave this with you. I want you to make yourself a committee of one to change somebody’s mind. You know, people who are not on the same page as you are. Change their mind. Not gonna happen in a day. You’re going to have to work at it. But if people have been taught to hate, they could be taught to love. And it’s up to you to do it.”
Tiffany then returned to the stage, telling the audience that, “We have spent 46 years helping families break the cycle of violence. Last year alone, we served over 44,000 individuals. But here’s the heartbreaking reality — the calls keep coming. This is why our work at The Family Place is comprehensive. We operate three emergency shelters, including the only shelter for men and their children in Texas. We also have an on-site kennel for client who want to be with their pets. We offer 24/7 crisis support, counseling and medical and dental care. We also provide long-term transitional housing to give families the time and resources to start over safely. We offer programs like our court-ordered battering intervention and prevention program, where we work directly with offenders and through our Be Project, we teach students about healthy relationships and stopping the cycle of violence before it starts. The work that we do truly saves lives, but it takes resources, advocates and supporters like you. Together, we can break the cycle of family violence. When we shine a light on this issue, we show survivors a new path forward.”
To connect the dots of shining a light with the need for support, Honorary Co-Chair Lindsay Billingsley followed, admitting that, “As an American, I am saddened by the fact that one in four women has been a victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. But as a Texan, I’m even sadder that our numbers are actually higher. One in three women and one in seven men in Texas are impacted by family violence. This number is jarring, statistically representing three of your friends seated at your table.”
As she rolled out the various opportunities that would result from donations, she encouraged guests to turn on the candles at their places and donate to help meet the $50,000 match offered by the Holman Family Foundation. As the room darkened, it appeared that 800 lights shone throughout the room.
In closing, Lindsay said, “We are going to shine our lights brightly in a world where people are suffering from some darkness of family violence. Every dollar, every donation you make is another life shining in the darkness for families who desperately need it.”
When the lights came back up, associate professor of law and director of the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women at SMU Natalie Nanasi and keynote speaker Justin took their places onstage for a conversation focused on his work bringing to light the issue of domestic violence, with the following highlights:
- The source of “It Ends With Us” — “I can’t take credit for the story. That’s a beautiful book written by Colin Hoover, based on a personal experience and dedicated to her mother…. . When I first read the book, I found myself judging the character who was in an abusive situation, and I found myself as a man just saying, ‘Well, just leave. Just leave. Come on, he’s clearly abusing you. Just leave.’ And I didn’t like how that made me feel. I didn’t like that I was judging her and the situation. And by the end of the book, I just had this beautiful, cathartic experience where it all made sense and I understood it. It had that pretty profound effect on me, and so I can only imagine the effect that it had on so many women and survivors. So many of which who also don’t necessarily know they’re in abusive relationships, which is one of the magic tricks I think that abusers pull on victims. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to develop this and turn it into a film.”
- Why did he make the characters in the movie older than those in the book? — “I knew if this movie were to come out, we were going to see a 22- or 23-year-old young woman in this situation, there was a very good chance that a lot of people would write it off as a mistake one would make in their youth.”
- The best kept secret — “Domestic violence and partner violence and violence against women is, unfortunately, the worst kept secret. In our country it’s not a secret, and yet we don’t talk about it. We’re afraid to talk about it. And I mean, the data is alarming.”
- Is there a stereotypical victim and/or abuser? — “There is just no certain type of victim and there’s no certain type of abuser. This is prevalent everywhere. This is not a class issue or a wealth issue or a socioeconomic status issue.”
- The challenge facing men — “It starts with how we are raised. It starts with the society in the world that we live in, the way that we treat and value women, the way that we view and objectify women, and the way that young boys are taught to view and to treat and objectify women. And then it even goes further into the way that we are taught we need to feel good about ourselves as men and boys. What does it mean to be a man? Does it mean to be a boy who was raised as a man, and then to have to feel like you are enough as a man? Power, dominance, control status. It’s built into our DNA, so we have to deprogram ourselves in so many ways…. I see boys and men feeling like they’re under attack and that’s never going to solve anything. If you ever have a conversation with somebody you love and you yell at them, the chances are they’re never going to hear you. So we have to speak to boys and men in a language that we can understand, understanding also that we have a little bit of a of a deficit, maybe, as it relates to our female counterparts.”
- The first act of violence — “The late great Bell Hooks talks about the first act of violence that men commit in a patriarchal society isn’t violence against women. It’s violence against themselves in an act that she called ‘soul murder.’ So long before a man ever harms a woman, we have to understand that he has harmed himself, and that harm happens when we start to repress our emotions and feelings because we’re not allowed to have them in relation with other men because we get bullied.”
- Emotional freedom for men — “Men, young men and boys oftentimes grow up in places where there is no space, whether it is with boys or girls, to be emotionally free, sensitive, compassionate, empathetic and vulnerable. As a result we learn to kill that part of ourselves, and when we kill that part of ourselves or numb that part of ourselves, we’re no longer able to feel. If we’re no longer able to feel, then we’re lacking compassion and empathy, which are the antidotes to violence against women.”
- The bystander approach — “Jackson Katz has developed this program based on the idea that men can only commit acts of violence against women because other men let it happen. When we stand up to another man and are willing to say ‘That’s not okay,’ we risk losing our man card, which becomes our identity because we have created an external validation as men, where other men dictate whether or not we’re considered men, versus having our internal validation of knowing that ‘I’m a man; I’m enough as I am,’ and these other men can’t take that away from me. So we have to be willing to stand up and stop it before it starts…. If I’m silent and a man ends up being an abuser, then that only happened because I didn’t say something. And this is where it starts. So we teach our boys a new definition of bravery, a new definition of strength, a new definition of standing up for what is right.”
- Men vs. women sensitivity — “I cite a study in my book, ‘Man Enough,’ where they actually tested the sensitivity of men and women. They had these two groups hooked up to machines to measure their body response as they looked at pretty intense images. They found that men and women were nearly identical in their response to the images. In fact, men were actually slightly faster in their response. The difference in the data was interesting that the more images that were shown, the men got less responsive. And that is because men know how to numb themselves, and the women weren’t raised that way. You didn’t have the privilege of being raised that way. So, we have to teach our boys and also our men, and I hate to say it, but like, validate them for the bravery and courage that it takes to be emotionally vulnerable and sensitive, versus shaming them as young boys and then teenagers and then men.”
- Sarah — “Three or four years ago, a young woman, Sarah, was murdered in England by a police officer. This was a pivotal moment for me. What they did in England was they instituted a curfew for women. That was a light bulb moment, because a woman was out in public and was murdered by a man in power, and the response of the government was to tell the women to stay inside. So women were then punished for something that a man did, and the response wasn’t, ‘Let’s have the men stay in.’ The response was the women. And why is that? Perhaps it was because there were more men in charge that were instituting the rules. It was more than likely, ‘Oh, we have to. We have to keep the women safe. They should stay in.'”
- The definition of feeling — “When I was 30 years old, I went to a therapist who asked me how I was feeling. I gave him what I thought was an answer and he said, ‘That’s not a feeling.’ So, I gave him another answer and that’s not feeling either. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my own feelings because we don’t teach boy how to feel, and that’s something that everybody in this room can do better, especially fathers. Young boys learn so much from their fathers. We men have a responsibility to teach emotional intelligence to our children, to our boys. I did not know the vocabulary of feelings at 30 years old. And this is an important thing to understand and I’m not embarrassed about it, because this is a societal issue. And then once you learn feelings, you go, ‘Oh, there’s this world that’s unlocked for me.’ Once that can come in and I can start to feel my body, I can feel what I’m feeling. Then I can start to feel what other people are feeling, and then we have a word for that. It’s empathy, not something that was ever taught to me. Some of that is because I’m a straight white man, and it never had to be taught to me. It’s different in every community, but I believe it starts there.”
Immediately concluding the talk, Justin leapt off the stage and went straight to Opal, who was seated on the front row. Taking her hand, the man of the hour was showing his admiration and awe to a legendary trailblazer.