YWCA Bergen expands to Essex, Hudson, Morris and Passaic counties – NorthJersey.com

HACKENSACK — On the cusp of its centennial, a Bergen County women’s rights and advocacy organization is expanding its footprint to four more North Jersey counties, making it the largest organization of its kind in the state.

In a press conference Monday, the YWCA Bergen County announced it would expand its services to Essex, Hudson, Morris and Passaic counties, parts of the state where YWCAs have either shuttered or never existed. The YWCA offers a wide range of programs, including child care and aid for survivors of sexual violence. Its expansion would bring those services to parts of New Jersey clamoring for those resources.

“It just really provides the opportunity for us to do the great work we’re doing, but so much more of it,”  Helen Archontou, chief executive of the YWCA Bergen County, said. “And help so many more people in New Jersey.”

As one of just three YWCAs in the state, the expansion will make YWCA Bergen the largest of the three. To reflect its larger reach, the association will now be called YWCA Northern New Jersey, said Archontou. The name change will be official in the fall, she said.

The expansion was goaded on by the deepening gap in services across neighboring counties, said Archontou. As the YWCA Bergen maintained its programming, many programs began to close due to financial problems or simply disappear, she said.

“Over the last six years, I have received phone calls from either key organizations or leaders in these communities asking if we would come and do some programming,” said Archontou. “Some of these communities did have YWCA programs that either went bankrupt or for some reason are no longer in existence. And so there was a need that suddenly appeared.”

The association’s push will begin with community meetings to assess the needs and shortcomings of each respective county, said Archontou. While there are no plans to build or open new satellite locations, the association will likely bring resources into the community, she said.

Since its founding in 1920 in Ridgewood, the YWCA Bergen has led the charge for racial justice and women’s rights and positioned itself as a safe haven for women looking for help amid domestic and sexual violence. For many of the prominent women leaders who spoke at the press conference, a YWCA is where they learned to lead.

“What did I gain from that experience?” said Lt. Governor Sheila Oliver, who attended a YWCA in Newark as a child. “I learned how to run a meeting. Learned Robert rules [of order]. We learned how to raise money. And we learned how to socialize with young people from all over the county.”

In recent years, the association has been at the forefront of the fight against sexual violence, offering help to residents through their Healing Space, the county’s only sexual violence resource center. In the wake of the MeToo and Time’s Up movements, the YWCA has spearheaded the Time Is Now Action Coalition, a mix of government, business, labor, education, legal, faith-based and nonprofit leaders intent on learning about and battling sexual harassment and violence.

The shift has made the YWCA, once primarily known for swimming pools and hostels, a hub for social justice issues in a time when it is necessary, said Oliver.

“The Y of yesteryear is not the YWCA of today,” said Oliver. “The fact that the YWCA of Bergen has adopted as its credo ‘Eliminating racism. Empowering woman’ is reflective, I believe, of the transition of the Y that has morphed into something that is very very different.”

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