White House Director of Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to Keynote Baylor Forum on FACTS: A Faith-Based and Community Solution to Reduce Domestic Violence

Media contact: Lori Fogleman, director of media communications, (254) 710-6275

Baylor University will host Jay Hein, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who will keynote a forum on "FACTS: A Faith-Based and Community Solution to Reduce Domestic Violence" from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, in the Kronzer Great Hall at Baylor's Hughes-Dillard Alumni Center, 1212 S. University Parks Drive in Waco, Texas.

(Directions to Baylor and a campus map are available at www.baylor.edu/map.)

As the nation observes National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the roundtable will highlight the successes of the Faith And Community Technical Support (FACTS) program, a one-year rural pilot program funded by an approximately $3 million grant from the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), an agency within the U.S. Department of Justice. The grant was one of the first given by the OVW that provided funds to faith-based organizations.

The FACTS program is a collaboration between staff at the Office of Victim Services (OVS) in Helena, Mont., and the principal project staff at the Program on Prosocial Behavior, a unit of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (ISR).

During the past year, FACTS acted as an intermediary between OVW and small community and faith-based programs in order to locate potential grantees, oversee a national grant competition, disseminate grant awards and provide technical assistance to sub-awardees in rural communities throughout the United States. The goal of the project was to build capacity in small grassroots organizations providing social services to victims of domestic violence in rural and isolated communities. FACTS provided funding and ongoing technical assistance to 39 such programs.

Programs to be highlighted:

• Iva's Place Inc., Lenoir City, Tenn., serving Loudon and Monroe counties in lower east Tennessee

• The Family Peace Project, Henderson County, Texas

• Southwest Arkansas Domestic Violence Center, De Queen, Ark., serving six counties in Southwest Arkansas

Participants in the FACTS Forum will include:

• Dr. John M. Lilley, Baylor University President

• Jay Hein, Deputy Assistant to President Bush and Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

• Dr. Byron R. Johnson, Co-Director of the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion

• Neil Websdale, Professor of Criminal Justice, Northern Arizona University and Principal Project Advisor to the Faith and Community Technical Support (FACTS) Program

• Nancy Grimes, Director, Iva's Place, Inc., Lenoir City, Tenn.

• Marlena Taylor, Executive Director, The Family Peace Project (FPP), Henderson County, Texas

• Sandra Renfrow, Director, Southwest Arkansas Domestic Violence Center, DeQueen, Ark.

The forum is open to the media. Following the presentation, there will be question-and-answer session, moderated by Byron Johnson. For television reporters and photographers, KWBU-TV will provide a clean audio feed to an audio multbox.

The FACTS Forum also will be available via streaming video later Thursday afternoon on

www.BaylorTV.com.

For more information, contact Lori Fogleman, director of media communications at Baylor, at (254) 710-6275 or Byron Johnson in the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor at (254) 710-7555.

HELPFUL WEB SITES:

Baylor Institute Receives $2.97 Million from Justice Department for Domestic Violence Research, June 22, 2006

FACTS at Baylor

Office of Violence Against Women

White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives