Diane Zainhofsky didn’t really want to be executive director of the Abused Adult Resource Center 33 years ago.
She didn’t want to get involved with paperwork and grants. She just wanted to provide services to women who were being abused.
She found a way to do both.
Since taking the reins, she has helped build the center into an organization that now employs 73 people at six sites. In its first year the center assisted 17 victims. Last year that number was 1,300. She’s retiring at the end of the month after 39 years at the center.
“I feel really blessed that this community really blanketed around me,” Zainhofsky said. “The journey itself seems like a lifetime, but also it feels like a blink of an eye.”
Zainhofsky, 74, said the work of the center is continuous, always focusing on what battered women will need next. When the first two-room shelter opened in 1980, Zainhofsky was a direct services advocate. As the center helped women, she noticed the effects of violence on the children who were witnessing it.
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In 1990, the first child advocate joined the staff. Several such steps through the years have made the center in a way complete a circle, she said, with an emergency shelter, transitional shelter and permanent housing. One is named in her honor — the Diane Zainhofsky Hope House. Biggest among the successes, she said, was the center’s merger with the Rape Crisis Center.
But it was more than bricks and mortar for Zainhofsky. She formed relationships with police and sheriff's departments, met with judges and lobbied for strong North Dakota laws.
“That work was a whole separate challenge,” she said. “You went there every single day in order to be able to convince legislators that women needed protection.”
For all her work, Zainhofsky says the center’s success isn’t her doing. She said the staff is amazing, as is the support from the community.
“We just had such an abundance of gifted proceeds coming from this community that I guess I just never really worried about money,” she said. “I just knew it was always going to come.”
In her career Zainhofsky was involved with nine families who had lost a family member to homicide. In one of those cases a woman was shot by her husband in 1991 as their three children watched. Zainhofsky continues to fight for the family and was successful last year in petitioning the parole board to keep him in prison.
Some of the women helped by the center stay in touch with Zainhofsky. A few years ago, a woman with six children was staying at the shelter. She had drug and alcohol issues and was leaving her children with other women at the shelter. It had to stop, and Zainhofsky encouraged her to check herself into a treatment facility. The woman was angry, yelled obscenities, and stormed out of Zainhofsky's office. But she returned a few hours later and asked about arrangements for the care of her children. Zainhofsky found a way. The woman completed treatment, later got a nursing degree and is about to complete her doctorate in nursing.
Through the years Zainhofsky has shed tears for the good outcomes, like the nurse, and for the bad.
“I must have cried with thousands of women,” she said.
Michelle Erickson, who has been been executive director since April 1, has worked with Zainhofsky since 2005. She said Zainhofsky has trained her “probably from Day One” but has become her mentor in the last couple of years.
“She has this way of making you think about things in different ways,” Erickson said. “If I came to her with a problem, she kind of would make me work the problem out without me really realizing I was doing that.”
Zainhofsky’s leadership style is one of support and guidance, Erickson said, and she’s a “we” person, quick to give credit to those around her. Erickson said she looks forward to leading the center in her own way but also plans to honor the work Zainhofsky has done in the past.
Zainhofsky in retirement will visit her children and grandchildren in Minnesota, Wisconsin and California, and has plans to gather with her nieces and nephews in Colorado in July. She also plans to read books that aren’t about domestic violence and catch up on neglected house and yard work. For the first time in 39 years she owns a television, a luxury she hasn't had time for until now.
“I’m probably going to get involved with a little bit of Netflix,” she said. “It seems like that’s pretty exciting.”
Her late husband once told her that one day she’d wake up and know it was time to retire.
“And I know,” she said. “I’m so relieved.”
Zainhofsky has acted in an advisory role for the center since January. Her retirement party is 5-8 p.m. Friday at the Harvest Grill in Mandan.