Domestic Safety Resource Center Has New Director

Kathy McCorkle, Director of Domestic Safety Resource Center

Kathy McCorkle, the new Executive Director for the regional Domestic Safety Resource Center, provided the Prowers County Commissioners with a general outline of her duties last Thursday, December 11.  McCorkle is a former substance abuse counselor at RESADA in Las Animas and currently serves on the local Substance Abuse Task Force and started her new position with DSRC on the first of December.

“We’re going over a lot of our policies, procedures and protocols and looking at the basics of our mission, figuring out who we are, what we need to do and how we need to do it,” she explained.  McCorkle said she’d like to develop a MOU, Memorandum of Understanding between the county and the Resource Center.  There isn’t one now, but Commissioner Buxton-Andrade said it would be a good idea and would help with future grant applications and spell out what services are provided by Prowers County to the Center.  The Center is headquartered in the Prowers County Annex and receives its computer services from the county.

“We’re going through a transition process right now, touching bases with all the entities we work with and if any have any questions or concerns about the transition or the Center itself, we want to hear from them, she McCorkle stated.  “We’ve been reviewing the budget, looking at what we’ve got and what we can and can’t do and we’ve been learning a lot about the grants and make all those connections.  We’re coming up to a very busy time in our operation with the holidays approaching,” she said, adding that the Center is now back to 24 hour phone service to respond to calls.  “The La Junta Center spent a couple of days with us for a briefing and that was very helpful.”

McCorkle mentioned that the Center has a lot of ‘stuff’, such as apparel or frozen foods in the safe house, “But one of my goals is for us to not try to do everything, but do the things that we do very well.  We’re going to get those things out to people who actually use them all the time and can supply people who have those needs.”  She said the Center will direct the people they aid to other local agencies instead of trying to cover all the bases.  “We intend to connect people to the services they need,” she added.

McCorkle noted that the Fantasy Tree fundraiser had one of their best auctions for donations in the eleven years they’ve been contributing to the Center and the Zonta group will be donating the funds they received from the recent annual holiday home tour.

By Russ Baldwin