Staff Spotlight
Indigo Harris
Indigo is an Advocate and Case Manager at the Domestic Abuse Project. They are skilled, compassionate, and hilarious! Read on to learn more about them, their favorite skills they’ve developed at DAP, as well as what they’re going to be for Halloween!
DAP: What is your name, your pronouns, and your role at DAP?
Indigo: My name is Indigo Harris (they/them), and I am an Advocate/Case Manager!
DAP: What exactly do you do in your role as an Advocate/Case Manager, and what have been some of your favorite skills to develop?
Indigo: There’re a few different things that I do as an advocate/case manager. All of our services revolve around creating and maintaining safety for our clients. I’m able to provide services such as: working with clients on filing Orders for Protection and Harassment Restraining Orders, assisting with lease breaks, helping facilitate lock changes, assisting with applications for Safe at Home, and assessing clients for Coordinated Entry, which is a system in place to assess clients’ housing needs so that we can then connect them with housing referrals.
Even though I’ve only been here for a short time, I feel like I’ve already developed and strengthened so many skills, which I credit to how strong the team is and how much they care about both my growth as an advocate and the clients that we work with. So far, I can really feel my ability to break free from scripted ways of interacting with clients growing. Being new to advocacy, I stuck to a lot of the outlines and scripts given to make sure that I was hitting everything that I needed to and to make sure that I was saying the “right” things. While it’s totally fine to utilize those things, especially when you’re new, I could see how doing that was taking away from my interactions with people. But with more experience, I can really be attentive to what clients are saying to me (and what they are saying without explicitly saying it), and identify what support needs they have and offer services and resources.
I’ve also gotten better at tracking smaller tasks and making sure I’m doing all of the paperwork and things. My brain does not do well with being detail oriented and organized, so I’ve had to develop and stick to a lot of different methods to make sure that I’m keeping track of everything that needs to be done.
DAP: What are your long-term career goals?
Indigo: This is a hard question for me because I can never stick to one career. I’ve been in a few different fields working different positions, but the thread through a lot of them has been advocacy. I think that I want to be a lawyer. The legal system is not built to support survivors. I see it directly in my work a lot, particularly around OFPs and HROs, but in a lot of different capacities. The other week, we attended a training course about new laws surrounding domestic violence. I found myself getting really angry and feeling powerless. Plus, finding someone that can support you is expensive, and not every lawyer has patience and compassion for the complexity of domestic abuse. I hope that I can change the narrative in the future.
DAP: What is your favorite part about working at DAP?
Indigo: There’s so much laughter! Everybody is so funny and willing to be themselves (and encouraged to do so) and it makes DAP such a fun and solid place to be. Beyond that, there’s a big willingness to grow and change. Even though we all mean well and try our best, there are still things that we can do better and there’s still harm that we can cause. There really seems to a be a push to interrogate ourselves and hold each other to task. I also appreciate how safe it is to make a mistake here. It’s an unavoidable part of being human (which is not my favorite thing at all, especially in this field) but it’s always an opportunity to do better and be better for our clients.
There’s also plenty of snacks...
DAP: Do you have any fun creative pursuits or other hobbies that take up your time outside of work?
Indigo: I love reading! I finished The Broken Earth series by N.K Jemisin not too long ago and have been doing my best balancing a few different books. I’m also in a craft-learning stage right now. When I was younger, I avoided doing a lot of crafting because I would get frustrated at not being immediately perfect at it, but the creative process is calming for me. I also struggled with doing one new skill at a time, so I never saw any of it through. But I’ve been doodling and learning crochet slowly. I’m also really into games and have been playing through the Ace Attorney and Yakuza series.
DAP: If you celebrate Halloween, what are you planning to dress up as?
Indigo: I’m never set on a costume until it’s too late. Every year I go through at least five different costume ideas and then get pressed when it’s October 30th and I have nothing. But right now, I’ve been debating Daria and Kiryu from the Yakuza series. I’ve also tossed around Kimberly from Street Fighter or a character from Animal Crossing (which would literally just be wearing the same outfit and hoping someone got it hahaha).
