Clockwise from far left, Pittsburgh Action Against Rape advocates Amelia Erlandson, Haley Kerr, Katie Van Ness; Advocacy Manager Vivian Sentmier; Megan Schroeder, director of victim response; and Kelsey Leigh, director of external affairs and strategic initiatives, during an advocates meeting at PAAR’s South Side offices, Monday, July 7, 2025. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
As Pennsylvania’s budget remains in limbo, agencies serving victims of sexual violence ask: Will they ever get a boost, or will a national model erode?
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For decades, rape crisis workers have helped survivors of sexual assault, rape and trafficking navigate some of the hardest moments of their lives. But without a funding increase since 2021 — and none included in the state’s proposed 2025–26 budget — many centers say they’re already making difficult trade-offs and may not be able to sustain current staffing levels, programming or wages and benefits.
The state’s funding for rape crisis services has held steady at $11.92 million since 2021. With staff wages comprising the bulk of costs, centers say the money simply doesn’t stretch as far as it once did.
“We just want to reinvest in the work we’re all already doing, which is just becoming a thinner and thinner shoestring budget,” said Kelsey Leigh, director of external affairs and strategic initiatives at Pittsburgh Action Against Rape [PAAR]. “We feel very strongly about treating our workers well and compensating them well for this very difficult work … This work is vicarious trauma.”
The funding, distributed by the state Department of Human Services, makes up a significant portion of the budgets for the 47 centers that offer rape crisis services across the state. That’s why many centers, in collaboration with their oversight agency Pennsylvania Coalition to Advance Respect [PCAR], are pushing for an $8 million increase, to be allocated based on size, population served and hours of service.
“Pennsylvania has always been cutting edge when it comes to victim services,” said Joyce Lukima, COO at PCAR. “That’s part of why it’s such a struggle right now to see this sort of apathy about the services that are being provided and the resources that are needed, because we have always been a model for the nation.”
The state issues are compounded by cuts to Victims of Crime Act funding, which is the major federal funding stream for many crisis centers, Lukima said.
Westmoreland school program could end
At the Blackburn Center, the first possible cut would be to education prevention programs it runs in the 19 school districts across Westmoreland County, Executive Director Renee Reitz said. Empathy, anti-bullying and harassment education is crucial to curbing sexual assault and she’s worried that cuts to programming could spike assault rates.
While Blackburn, in Greensburg, hasn’t faced layoffs or major changes to service offerings yet, it — much like other centers across the state — is bracing for hard times ahead, absent a funding boost. In 2024, $2.16 million of Blackburn’s $2.6 million revenue was government funded, according to filings with the IRS.
“We have to look at what we have to limit if we don’t get this funding increase,” Reitz said.
Julie LeVan, program director at Blackburn, said crisis workers are the backbone of survivor support.
“You can have the best nurse or doctor ever. You can have the best detective or law enforcement officer, and they can be what we call trauma informed … but having someone there that is solely … full focus is the survivor can be extremely helpful,” LeVan said.
From Washington to Lebanon, weighing waitlists
For centers in other parts of the state, the effects of static funding are already being realized.
Passages, which serves Clarion, Clearfield and Jefferson counties with a seven-person staff, isn’t able to offer employee benefits, said Executive Director Marlene Austin. The government provided $598,000 of its $886,000 in revenue in 2023, according to IRS filings.
Austin said that because of inflation, the stagnant funding is the equivalent of a 22% decrease for the Clarion-based service, which consequently eliminated its volunteer coordinator position, dispersing the role’s workload onto the rest of the staff. They also recently lost their prevention educator due to the low pay they have to offer, Austin said.
“I’d say [there have been] 150 programs that we were unable to do in a three-month period because we lost a prevention educator,” she said. “So there that’s children in our schools that aren’t getting the help.”
Further east, the Sexual Assault Resource and Counseling Center of Lebanon and Schuylkill counties has had to cut seven full-time positions, President and CEO Alissa Perrotto said. At SARCC, $922,000 of its $1.3 million in 2023-24 revenue came from government streams.
The organization is already facing cutbacks to prevention education services and has had to create waitlists for therapy.
“All of this is happening at the same time that we have seen drastic increases in demand for sexual assault services,” Perrotto said.
In Washington County, like others, administrators help with direct service work on a weekly basis because of thin staffing, said Joanna Dragan, supervisor of sexual assault services at the STTARS program, for Sexual Trauma Treatment and Recovery Services.
Diverting administrators to client work “is kind of a Catch-22,” Dragan said. “While our main mission is to serve victims and survivors … the reporting burden has become more and more cumbersome over the years as far as justifying the work that we do in order to maintain funding.”
This comes at a time when the six-person organization, based in Washington, Pennsylvania, is seeing client needs become more complex, Dragan said.
“While our center is dedicated to never having a waiting list for services … it’s putting more and more stress on our staff to meet the needs of those that we serve.”
Allegheny County’s PAAR may see more cases
Amelia Erlandson can’t be in two places at once, but some days, it feels like she has to be. On July 7, while sitting through a sentencing hearing at the Allegheny County Courthouse, she was also helping a family in Westmoreland County arrange transportation to court.
Centers like PAAR offer a range of services to survivors and their families, including medical and legal assistance and both long- and short-term trauma counseling. They are legally required to respond to calls to their 24/7 hotline or service requests from law enforcement and medical workers within an hour, said Leigh.
There is no predicting hotline calls or when you might have to pick up a colleague’s workload for the day because they are sick, Erlandson said.
In 2024, $3.7 million of PAAR’s $4.2 million in revenue came from government streams, according to financial disclosures. Leigh said $778,000 of that $3.7 million is from the state.
The budgetary pressure has led already to an inability to fill open positions. Still, Leigh said PAAR is in a better position than centers in more rural areas that solely rely on government funds.
“The last six months have been a bit exhausting,” Erlandson said. “The workload has been manageable, but in anticipation of it getting worse, that in itself, has been very wearing for burnout.”
Erlandson and colleagues on the PAAR advocacy team didn’t express much concern for themselves — it’s their clients, especially those who do not seek legal action against their abusers, who they worry will fall through the cracks.
The PAAR Victim Response Team of eight people each have an average caseload of 35 to 40 clients at a time. In many cases, five advocates said, they are the only ones who survivors can turn to for reliable, non-judgmental and trained aid through all steps of the healing process. That involves tempering client expectations through the justice system, support through the resulting retraumatization and helping them regain agency as they retell their story.
Services aren’t standardized either, the team said: It is client-led, with some keeping in touch with the organization for years and others only seeking services for immediate trauma response.
Leigh said some rural centers may rely solely on government funds and when service capabilities across the state become slim, the survivors still need somewhere to turn, Leigh said.
“They’re going to travel into Pittsburgh … and they’re going to need services from us. We don’t turn people away,” she said. “We are not allowed to have a waiting list for our 24/7 services. So we will have to figure out how to make it work.”
Harrisburg may not know the implications
Leigh said she thinks some of the funding shortfall is simply a lack of awareness. She said legislators often don’t realize that rape crisis is funded through a different line item than domestic assault because many centers offer both resources.
In Pennsylvania, 13 are stand-alone rape and sexual assault crisis, Lukima, the PCAR administrator, said, while other comprehensive centers offer additional domestic violence services. The domestic violence line item, which received a $2.5 million increase last year, can only be used for domestic violence services, even at comprehensive centers, said Reitz at Blackburn.
That leaves comprehensive centers with a decision to make.
“We would have to prioritize, unfortunately, going and supporting the domestic violence victim, because the funding is there,” Reitz said.
Brandon Cwalina, press secretary for the Department of Human Services [DHS], wrote in an email that the Shapiro administration is committed to supporting crisis centers and highlighted an October 2024 act requiring statewide electronic tracking of rape kits.
“The goal of Pennsylvania’s statewide sexual assault kit tracking system initiative is to empower survivors and enhance public safety through greater accountability by standardizing procedures, improving efficiency, and reducing delays, leading to more solved cases,” Cwalina said.
Changes to the DHS budget have to be approved by the General Assembly. Prior to the most recent increase of $1 million in the 2021-22 fiscal year, the rape crisis line item saw consistent increases of about 10% every few years. Goods and services now cost around 20% more than they did in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator.
While the state budget had not been passed by the state Senate as of July 18, Leigh and others said some legislators had voiced support. Several House representatives and state senators have signed letters of support for the increase.
“If we’re talking about protecting victims, then we should actually fund the work that protects victims,” said state Sen. Lindsey Williams, D-West View.
If funding doesn’t come through now, Lukima said PCAR and other organizations will still push for it in future budgets, but likely with a reduced workforce to support lobbying.
“We’re in a time of crisis for our programs and I do feel it’s different than times in the past,” Lukima said. “I really am worried that the services are not going to be there for survivors.”
Ember Duke, a Pittsburgh’s Public Source editorial intern, is a recent graduate of Duquesne University and one of 10 Pittsburgh Media Partnership summer interns. She can be reached at ember@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Caleb Kaufman.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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