Patrisha McLean, founder and CEO of the Maine nonprofit Finding Our Voices, is a featured speaker on an October 21 webinar co-sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women.

Building Safer Communities: Addressing Domestic Abuse highlights community and advocacy approaches for improving safety for families and individuals. McLean was invited to share the ground-breaking, survivor-powered approach and programs that Finding Our Voices is bringing to women and children domestic abuse victims across Maine.  

The free online discussion is from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. (EST), and open to the public by registering on the home page of the Finding Our Voices website or through this link: https://ncjwcns.org/events/oct2024-spotlightsalon/H

Sponsors of the Domestic Abuse Awareness Month event are the National Council of Jewish Women Chicago North Shore and SHALVA in Chicago. SHALVA is the oldest independent Jewish domestic abuse agency in the United States. The National Council of Jewish Women advances social change through a faith-based Jewish lens, bringing together activists across generations and across the country. 

Women leaders joining McLean on the webinar are Amanda Pyron, executive director of an umbrella organization of 40-plus Chicago groups dedicated to improving lives of those impacted by domestic violence; Marlene Copeland, executive director of SHALVA; and Elizabeth Ury, director of Jewish Community Engagement at JCFS Chicago.

McLean and her daughter Jackie were the keynote speakers at SHALVA’s annual fundraising luncheon in 2021. They talked about how they were each impacted by the domestic abuse in their home, and how talking about it together helped them to heal. 

On October 5 in Skowhegan, McLean will be giving a morning presentation on how she found her own voice after three decades of domestic abuse, leading to her forming Finding Our Voices, at the first Women’s Health Conference at Reddington-Fairview General Hospital. 

McLean’s other speaking engagements during October’s Domestic Abuse Awareness Month include hosting acclaimed author Andre Dubus lll for an online conversation in the Finding Our Voices Book Club on October 8, and facilitating stops of the Finding Our Voices “Let’s Talk About It” tour stops October 9, 24, and 26 at Southern Maine Community College, Maine Irish Heritage Center in Portland, and the Falmouth Memorial Library. 

On October 17, the Augusta oral surgeon Dr. Rob Berube will join McLean in a presentation to the Androscoggin Valley Dental Society about Finding Our Smiles. Dr. Berube is one of 30 Maine dentists providing access to free, dignified, and gold-standard dental treatment for women and child domestic abuse survivors through this ground-breaking Finding Our Voices program. 

Finding Our Voices is the grassroots and survivor-powered nonprofit breaking the silence, stigma, and cycle of domestic abuse across Maine through innovative public awareness campaigns, and tangible assistance to Maine women and children victims. 

The spark for the nonprofit was the domestic violence arrest in Camden of McLean's then-husband of 29 years Don “American Pie” McLean. “With the headlines of the arrest,” McLean has publicly stated, "women all around me in my small community let me know they too had gone through domestic abuse. All that time, I thought I was alone, and I didn’t even know what I was going through had a name.”

A multi-media exhibit of Patrisha’s photo portraits of 14 local survivors accompanied by audio recordings launched at the Camden Public Library on Valentine’s Day 2019, and spent four months at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center in Augusta. The indoor exhibit segued to an outdoor poster campaign with the onset of COVID and now features the photo portraits and quotes of 45 Maine women survivors aged 18 to 84 and including Governor Mills in downtown business windows and public bathrooms in 100 Maine towns. Finding Our Voices became a nonprofit in 2021, according to McLean, to fill “the huge gaps in our State for programs and services for women domestic abuse survivors, and also to reform a ‘justice’ system that currently provides way more rights and consideration to domestic violence perpetrators than their victims.”

For more information about Finding Our Voices and its October events visit https://findingourvoices.net.