Four students at Salt Lake Community College took to the Taylorsville Redwood campus on Tuesday to raise funds and collect furniture for nonprofit Safe Harbor, a center in Davis County that serves victims of abuse, stalking and dating violence in Utah.
The students – David Schafler, Diana Onorato, Karli Jensen and Roland Marte – organized the drive for their management capstone class at SLCC’s Gail Miller School of Business. Roughly 10 community members stopped by the business building to unload dressers, bookshelves, ottomans, bed frames and other well-conditioned room furnishings.
The donated furniture will go to individuals and families staying in 14 new rooms at Safe Harbor’s crisis shelter. The shelter provides housing and comprehensive services like support groups, therapy, employment assistance, life-skills training, and medical appointments to domestic violence victims.
“We were given the opportunity to choose a partnership [for our project] that we felt inclined to help with,” said Onorato, a sophomore majoring in business management. “I suggested [Safe Harbor] because I felt like there was a great opportunity to help them.”
“They just opened up additional apartment units that they’re looking to furnish,” Onorato added. “We felt it would be a really good opportunity and [that] we could make a huge difference for them.”
Safe Harbor also helps domestic violence victims transition back into apartments and living spaces of their own. Onorato said recipients of the donated items will be able to take those items with them when they’re ready to leave the center.
Domestic violence in Utah is at an all-time high
KUTV reported last October that instances of domestic violence, which includes dating violence, stalking and sexual assault, are at an all-time high in Utah.
At the time of KUTV’s report, there had already been 1,552 domestic violence-related arrests in the state. This figure nearly reached the 1,829 total arrests in 2022, even before 2023 had concluded.
Furthermore, in March 2023, the Utah Women and Leadership Project at Utah State University found in their research that one in three Utah women “will experience some form of contact sexual violence, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.”
While some claim that the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a rise in domestic violence cases in Utah, the numbers continue to surge four years later. Schafler attributes some of this to the disconnect that many face in the 21st century.
“I have never been affected in the same way as those we are trying to help, but I have people I know and friends that have had to deal with it,” Schafler said. “As we progress to being more disassociated from each other, I think the group [Safe Harbor] is trying to support grows ever larger.”
A crash course in building community connections
The capstone course project, Schafler said, serves as a “culmination of skills that [we’ve] had to learn and adapt throughout [our] education … for this class, there’s a marketing aspect, a management aspect, and a computer science and information systems aspect.”
Schafler’s main responsibility, for example, was to coordinate communication with SLCC, Safe Harbor, and the Riverton and Herriman communities, where the student group will pick up furniture from individual residences on April 13 and 20, respectively.
Onorato was responsible for making the digital flyer for the furniture drive. The flyer Onorato came up with contains a QR code that leads respondents to an accompanying Google form, where individuals can designate their address for the Riverton and Herriman pickup dates and upload images of their furniture. The pictures are for the student group to look at and decide whether the pieces are in good enough shape to donate to the center.
Schafler said if the group has extra time outside of picking up at residences in Riverton and Herriman, they are “more than willing” to travel to other nearby neighborhoods, should respondents indicate in the Google form that they have adequate furniture to give.
According to the four students, the beginning of the month-long effort was an irrefutable success. One Taylorsville resident, Jodie Lawrence, said she learned about the drive on the city’s Facebook page, which was posted after Schafler communicated with the Taylorsville city government.
Lawrence dropped off multiple pieces of furniture, including a large antique-style dresser made from wood. She said the items were gathering dust in her garage and that another family member wanted to take them to the dump.
“But I said no,” Lawrence said. “We wanted to give [our things] to somebody who could use them.”
Any Riverton or Herriman resident, as well as anyone from nearby neighborhoods, can use the QR code on the flyer to access the Google form for the furniture drives on April 13 and 20.
To learn more about Safe Harbor and the work they do for victims of domestic violence in Utah, visit their website at safeharborhope.org.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Jensen’s first name and the number of new rooms at Safe Harbor.
