YWCA Clark County CEO Brittini Lasseigne has been working to stabilize the organization since taking the helm in 2022. (Taylor Balkom/The Columbian)Photo Gallery
The YWCA operates Clark County’s only domestic violence shelter, which can house 45 people at one time. That’s not big enough to help all those fleeing abuse.
“A lot of the time people will say, ‘It’s not life or death,’ but the majority of the work we’re doing is,” said Brittini Lasseigne, CEO of YWCA Clark County.
And, unfortunately, demand for that work is increasing. After a murder-suicide left five dead in an Orchards home in December, calls to the YWCA’s domestic violence hotline spiked by 50 percent.
Lasseigne, the first Black woman to lead the organization, has a long to-do list since taking over as CEO in October 2022. YWCA Clark County is a little more than a year into a five-year project to expand the domestic violence shelter and its programs, including a new collaboration with PeaceHealth Southwest’s emergency department. The YWCA also offers other programs, including a preschool. All told, the YWCA served 12,626 people in 2022.
Domestic violence
In Washington, 41.4% of women and 31.7% of men experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner rape or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes.
— SOURCE: National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
In November, Lasseigne visited the White House along with other local officials from Oregon and Southwest Washington, where they discussed how crucial federal funding is to sustain their programs. Since the YWCA receives funding through state and federal grants, including the Victims of Crime Act, it is susceptible to funding shortages like other domestic violence nonprofits around the country.
“During the pandemic, local organizations, including ours, creatively used the federal funds to strengthen our missions,” Lasseigne said. “Now, as this funding is about to run out, many organizations across the country face the difficult choice of reducing their services. Some have already made cuts, and others will follow suit within the next year.”
Expansion of the domestic violence shelter and its programs is expected to cost $5 million, with $3 million from the Ed and Dollie Lynch Fund covering the first two years entirely. From 2027 onward, the program will rely on government contracts, corporate backing and community contributions.
And while the YWCA is proud to offer this shelter resource for those needing to flee domestic violence, it simultaneously highlights the need for more resources in Clark County, Lasseigne said.
According to data from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 41.4 percent of Washington women and 31.7 percent of Washington men experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner rape or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes. Nationwide, 47.1 percent of women of color face physical violence or psychological aggression from an intimate partner, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Journey to the Y
The local YWCA — then the Young Women’s Christian Association — began as a Vancouver lunch counter for working women in 1916. Today, the organization goes by its acronym. Not all people who reach out for resources are young, women or Christian, Lasseigne said.
Although Lasseigne has been CEO for a year, her hands-on involvement with the YWCA goes back almost two decades.
Lasseigne, 37, was born in Lewiston, Idaho, but later moved to Vancouver where she lived until the fourth grade. After living in Spokane as a teenager, she made her way back to Clark County, where she majored in psychology at Washington State University Vancouver.
She started to volunteer for the YWCA’s Independent Living Skills Program, which helps youth age 15-23 transition from foster care to solo living. After a year of volunteering for that program, she was officially hired as an AmeriCorps intern. During this internship and senior year of college, she had a daughter.
“I would lead the groups for foster youth with my daughter and they would just hold her while I was teaching them,” Lasseigne said. “It was a very real experience for them, too, because here I was this 19- or 20-year-old, navigating this space and some of them were also going through that transition. It was very much a peer-to-peer experience.”
After her internship ended, Lasseigne moved back to Spokane for 10 years. There, she continued her work in advocacy at a group home for foster youth. But she wanted to make an impact through administration, so she took on a program coordinator role at the Martin Luther King Center.
In 2012, she relocated to Portland and landed a job as philanthropy manager at YWCA Clark County in 2017. Within three months, she was promoted to philanthropy director. YWCA is funded through state and federal grants, but also through private donors, donations and endowments.
“I realized this is where I really thrived,” Lasseigne said. “It was exciting because the Y was in a place where they’d done a lot of strategic planning, and I helped them focus how that could be possible in the future.”
After five years with Lasseigne as philanthropy director, the YWCA was operating within its budget.
“What was being overlooked was financial stability. Starting new things can be exciting, but you also need to have that base to be financially secure,” she said.
A step away
Her success as YWCA Clark County’s philanthropy director took a toll. Lasseigne felt burned out. She left the organization for a year.
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“It was the break that I needed to show me that my heart was here. My heart is in racial equity work and violence prevention, not just because of my lived experience, but also seeing the difference we’re having in the community,” Lasseigne said.
Lasseigne transitioned into the CEO role following her yearlong break when the position opened in 2022. She said she felt a lot of pressure coming into the position, especially as organization’s first Black woman CEO.
“When we think of nonprofits in general in Clark County, there’s not a ton of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) representation, especially BIPOC women,” Lasseigne said. “It can be hard being in this position sometimes when you’re trying to find your community to connect with.”
Lasseigne said she often feels like she’s expected to have all the answers when it comes to racism.
“It can be a really big balance,” she said.
Throughout the pandemic, the organization underwent a leadership change, welcoming approximately 50 new employees. With around 70 employees total, the executive leadership team is 50 percent women of color and its management team is 40 percent.
“Brittini has been a very empathetic and transparent leader. She has been working really hard at meeting with everybody and making sure that she’s accessible to all of the staff and providing as much information to them, so they understand where the organization is going,” said Vanessa Yarie, YWCA Clark County’s chief operations officer.
The organization’s leadership knows employees give their all.
“For a long time, we’ve operated under the space that we have to give so much of ourselves that it hurts,” Lasseigne said. “I think, naturally, the people that are attracted to this kind of work are the people with lived experience. … They so badly want to give back to the community because they were helped in a similar way, but that often leads to them giving away so much of themselves that they’re burning out.”
Breaking the cycle
Lasseigne finds hope in YWCA Clark County’s prevention program, which is only a year old but has already served more than 200 youth. The program aims to stop violence before it starts.
“For a long time, the crisis work was what was important because it’s right in front of us, but we’ve found over time that we have to break the cycle of violence,” Lasseigne said.
The multisession curriculum works with youth through weekly group sessions that the YWCA conducts on school campuses. Students have the choice to learn about establishing healthy boundaries, respectful communication and media impact on the culture of violence, according to Tanika Siscoe, prevention program director.
“We’re really focused on meeting with youth over time, introducing these concepts about what healthy relationships look like and the root causes of violence and oppression,” Siscoe said.
The YWCA’s mission — “eliminating racism, empowering women” — is grand, but Lasseigne said the organization works every day toward that goal.
As Lasseigne charts the YWCA’s path, she wants to ensure that people of color’s stories are told.
“Ours is a very big mission,” Lasseigne said. “We would all love to say that one day racism will be eliminated. I don’t know necessarily if that will happen, but we can certainly make steps towards it.”
This story was made possible by Community Funded Journalism, a project from The Columbian and the Local Media Foundation. Top donors include the Ed and Dollie Lynch Fund, Patricia, David and Jacob Nierenberg, Connie and Lee Kearney, Steve and Jan Oliva, The Cowlitz Tribal Foundation and the Mason E. Nolan Charitable Fund. The Columbian controls all content. For more information, visit columbian.com/cfj.
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