Sharon Rice Vaughan

Remembering 1979 Bush Fellow Sharon Rice Vaughan

April 30, 2015

We note with sadness the recent death of 1979 Bush Fellow Sharon Rice Vaughan in a car accident while in Cuba.

In 1974, Rice Vaughan offered the Foundation an opportunity—join the emerging domestic violence prevention movement with a $60,000 capital grant to Women’s Advocates to create a place where women and children could be safe from domestic violence.  Today, the renovated house where Women’s Advocates began sheltering women and children is recognized as the first shelter in the country.

Over the next 35 years, the Foundation invested almost $16 million in myriad organizations working to end domestic violence. The challenge Rice Vaughan offered the Foundation im 1974 led to support for other important milestones in the movement’s history, including the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project’s development of the “Duluth Model,” a highly replicated treatment model.

Forty years and some 39,000 clients later, Women’s Advocates continues to provide shelter and supportive services to women and children escaping domestic violence. But in the beginning, Rice Vaughan said, “We became established just by doing it.”

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