Her Story
About Caprice
I'm the founder and executive director of Worthy Voices, a nonprofit organization that comes from my own lived experience. I come from a lineage of survivors of violence, and I myself am a survivor of violence, so I've always wanted to provide the level of servitude to the community that I have received and that I see lacks as well. The organization also came out of the pain from being laid off from my role with an organization that was providing battery intervention programming. They were one of two in Travis County, Texas providing this service, and I saw that it was gonna leave the community with a huge debt in this particular service that's needed for folks that are causing harm in their relationship. I decided to go ahead and launch the program, something I had already been wanting to do for a long time. We're still a really young organization, just coming up on our one year, and I'm leading it as well as continuously building relationships out in the community, building the program, building the infrastructure. I started back in Chicago, Illinois, about 27 years ago, and my first role was a caseworker assistant. I have experiences across disciplines - I've worked within substance misuse, domestic violence, mental health, I've worked with the IDD populations, I've worked in residential programs, housing instability, older persons, youth, transitional youth, so I have pretty much touched it all over the span of 27 years. I came to Texas about 10 years ago and continued the work that I started in Chicago here in Texas. Even though I'm in a leadership role, I really still enjoy working directly with people in the community directly, because I want to stay in understanding of what the true need is, and I don't want to get too far away from that.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Caprice
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say launching Worthy Voices is my most notable achievement because I have had many other challenges that I've failed at, and when we look at failure, it's actually opportunities that we have learned - learned what the community needs, what the community's not in need of at that time. Through those failures, through those layoffs, those other bumps in the road within the human services, we know that programs lose funding or are subjected to different changes, and I've experienced those. I have been able to persevere, and even with this most recent one, decided to launch Worthy Voices a year ago and have accomplished so much within this one year. We achieved our 501c3 status a few months after forming, we received our accreditation through the Texas Department of Criminal Justice CJAD department so that we could do one of our most impactful programs which is currently thriving, one of our groups is at 100% capacity, and we have gotten approved through Travis County. I've been told that orgs take about 2 or 3 years to get to some of the accomplishments that we have been able to make in just this past year. I stand on the shoulders of many - too many people to name - and I really want it to be reflective of everyone over the years that have poured into me as well.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would discuss with that person and share with them about having what is called DV goggles - when you become trained to understand domestic violence, you can't not see it. So you gain these DV goggles, and you start to see it in different places, and I would encourage them to think about that. How will you handle it if you see it not just in the professional realm? You'll see it in your personal life, you may see it in yourself, your own family. I would share with that person my own experience - I'm a survivor, and some of the information and education that I got and the revelation came when I became a professional. I got to see that domestic violence was in my family, domestic violence was in the marriage that I was in at that time. Sharing those kinds of experiences, I think, can be helpful in a person getting a real, true sense of what they may be embarking on to help them make that decision - is this really something that I can handle, that I really want to do?
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