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Safe Voices included in newly-released book
March 17, 2025
In 2024, Safe Voices’ then-Executive Director, Elise Johansen, and Director of Development and Engagement, Grace Kendall, were approached by author Seth Schulman about being interviewed for a forthcoming book about businessman and philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss. Wyss has been a longtime supporter of Safe Voices and our work to serve survivors of domestic abuse and sex trafficking, and when we learned that the project would be a deep dive into his philosophy of giving to facilitate impactful work, we were happy to take part. With permission of the authors, we are pleased to share an excerpt of the book (The Art of Impact: Action Principles for a World in Crisis from the Extraordinary Life of Hansjörg Wyss) below.
Chapter 12: THE “BRANDING IRON IN YOUR BRAIN” APPROACH TO GIVING
Direct your energies and resources by looking inward, focusing on areas that feel personally significant and enduring.
IN CITIES AND TOWNS across America, you’ll find kind, thoughtful, dedicated individuals advocating at the street level for society’s underdogs. Elise Johansen, executive director of a nonprofit organization called Safe Voices, is one of them. Founded in 1977, Safe Voices is a domestic abuse and sex trafficking resource center serving three under-resourced rural counties in Maine, including the poorest square mile in New England outside of Boston. With a staff of about thirty and a 2023 budget of $3 million, the organization operates a 24/7 emergency helpline that helps abuse survivors gain access to resources and strategize how best to stay safe or escape harmful situations. 241 Safe Voices also provides longer-term, personalized advocacy for individual survivors; offers emergency housing; runs support groups; and administers a domestic violence intervention program that educates batterers and provides them with the critical knowledge they need to make different choices and avoid abusive behavior.
The work performed by Safe Voices staffers is emotionally taxing. In a given week, they might help a woman escape a boyfriend who held a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her. They might counsel a woman trapped in a living situation with an alcoholic spouse, advising her on how to stay as safe as possible during future abusive encounters. They might assist a nonbinary victim in navigating the bureaucracy required to obtain restraining orders. They might help a male victim rent a new apartment by getting him the thirty-five dollars he needs to obtain the state ID a landlord requires as part of a rental application.
Over the past five years, demand for the services provided by Safe Voices has jumped by over 40 percent. Like many other forgotten places in the United States, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, these Maine counties have experienced a mental health crisis as well as a rise in homelessness and opioid addiction, all of which have led to an increase in sex trafficking and abuse. An ongoing housing crisis has made life more difficult for the victims of trafficking and abuse by making it extraordinarily difficult for them to escape harmful domestic situations. Although desperate to escape, they often have nowhere to go.
Although Safe Voices receives substantial public funding, it doesn’t come close to covering the costs of its programming, much less allow the organization to provide better compensation for its dedicated staff while making needed long-term improvements. To keep the lights on and strengthen the organization, Johansen must rely heavily on the generosity of philanthropists. And that’s where Hansjörg Wyss comes in.
“Although a one-time gift can help pay for programming, a consistent annual gift allows Johansen to include that money in the budgeting process and make longer-term investments, including increases in pay to retain dedicated and talented staff.”
One day in 2015, while going through the mail, Johansen’s predecessor found a check for $30,000 from the Wyss Foundation. At the time, Safe Voices had an annual budget of only $1.1 million, so $30,000 represented quite a significant gift. It came as a total surprise; Safe Voices staff didn’t have a previous relationship with Wyss or even know who he was. The surprise continued the next year when a check showed up again and the year after that, and the year after that. Wyss Foundation money gave the organization an enormous boost, comprising one of its larger sources of nongovernmental support. Unlike other philanthropic gifts, Wyss’s giving was one of the few that arrived consistently, year after year. Although a one-time gift can help pay for programming, a consistent annual gift allows Johansen to include that money in the budgeting process and make longer-term investments, including increases in pay to retain dedicated and talented staff. As she affirms, the impact of Wyss’s gift has been tremendous-so much so that she has reached out to the foundation to express her gratitude. “How do I say thank you?” she asks. “Because this is huge for us, and the impact is gigantic, and I feel like I want to tell him.”
Today, even after so many years of receiving checks from the Wyss Foundation, Johansen and her team remain surprised. Wyss is most widely known for his conservation-related philanthropy, especially his $1 billion commitment to the Wyss Campaign for Nature. What was he doing supporting a small organization like Safe Voices in an out-of-the-way corner of Maine? “We don’t know why he chose us,” says Grace Kendall, Safe Voices’ director of development and engagement. “He really mostly focuses on land conservation.”
While that observation may be true, Wyss’s donations to Safe Voices were no fluke. Wyss in recent years has supported an army of organizations that provide services or advocacy on behalf of or by women, including women experiencing domestic abuse. These include, among others, Abby’s House in Worcester, Massachusetts; the Elizabeth Stone House in Roxbury, Massachusetts; Peace Women Across the Globe, a Swiss-based “feminist peace organization”; and Rosie’s Place (billed as the nation’s first women’s shelter) and the Women’s Lunch Place, both in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Wyss Medical Foundation, established in 2009 and focused on addressing health disparities globally, has funded many other programs that address women’s health around the world. One of them is Seed Global Health, an NGO that seeks to improve health in less developed countries, in part through programs dedicated to improving maternal and child health. The organization helps to create a “pipeline of midwives, nurses, and obstetricians who advance access to respectful, high-quality care for 15 million expecting mothers and children” in four African countries. The Wyss Medical Foundation also supports Global Action in Nursing (GAIN), which helps to make childbirth safer in Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Liberia by providing training and mentoring to nurses.
Wyss has a deep, lifelong concern for women’s health and welfare. Switzerland during his youth was a culturally conservative society that adhered strictly to traditional religious teachings. Even into the 1970s, Swiss women couldn’t vote and enjoyed little autonomy in their economic affairs, unable even to open a bank account without their husband’s consent. Such patriarchy seemed to Wyss a gross injustice. It “upset me a great deal,” he says. “I was very upset. Really, physically-it made me mad.”
Wyss’s concern for women’s health was shaped by his mother, who was an iconoclast when it came to gender relations. It was the norm for housewives in his family’s neighborhood to hang sheets out on the balconies to dry during the morning hours, but as he recalls, his mother often refused, preferring to read a book instead. And after lunch each day, which she prepared, she insisted that his father clean up while she read the newspaper. “If the neighborhood would have known, they would have called the police. She was already very different. My parents were totally different from my friends’ parents, really.”
Wyss’s mother became politically active, marching in support of women’s voting rights, which Swiss women finally gained in 1971. Wyss remembers being astonished at the ridiculous things Swiss politicians said in their efforts to keep women out of politics. “They were the craziest arguments,” he says. “The most important meal in many Swiss families is Sunday lunch. And the politicians said, ‘Well, there will be no good Sunday lunch because the women will have to go and vote.” At an early age, such arguments led him to reject those who would diminish women and deny them the same opportunities as men, including control over their well-being. “You grow up with these arguments,” he says, “and it stays like a branding iron in your brain.” Decades later, he is still doing his part to fight oppression and lift up women.
“‘I feel like I know what’s next'”: An excerpt from the book’s conclusion
When it comes to the formidable impact they have on people’s lives, the smaller, more modest, less visible organizations on Wyss’s list of grantees are just as noteworthy as the larger ones. Take Safe Voices, the domestic violence resource center in Maine. Grace Kendall was present at the organization’s main offices one day when a woman came in urgently seeking help. Unlike most clients who ring the doorbell and wait for a staffer to let them in, this woman rapped on the door a couple of times a sign to staffers that she felt a powerful sense of immediate danger and a fear of being physically harmed. As the woman began to tell her story through a flood of tears, the desperation in her voice was evident. This woman “was not safe, and she knew it,” Kendall says.
Kendall’s colleague ushered the woman into her office and closed the door for a private conversation that lasted about forty-five minutes. Kendall doesn’t know what they discussed, but when her colleague’s office door opened again and the woman emerged, her disposition was entirely different. She had a smile on her face and sweetly thanked Kendall’s colleague, saying, “I feel like I know what’s next.” The woman’s situation hadn’t changed, but a trained advocate had listened to her story and strategized with her about handling her abuser so she could stay safe. Her suffering had eased, and she was in a better position to take some measure of control over her life.
“The woman’s situation hadn’t changed, but a trained advocate had listened to her story and strategized with her about handling her abuser so she could stay safe.”
After the woman left, Grace and others in the office went over to their colleague to compliment her on her efforts. “Do you see what you just did here?” they said to her. “You took this woman who was panicking and desperate and really hopeless, and she left able to say, ‘I know what to do next.” And in that moment, all of them broke down in tears. As enormous as the problem of domestic violence is, and as hard and necessary as their daily work continues to be, the impact they are having on their community is palpable. They are making a difference, changing their clients’ lives for the better.
There isn’t space in this chapter to describe all that Hansjörg Wyss has done to impact women’s issues, social justice, and the arts. Suffice it to say that Wyss magnified his impact by meeting the needs and pursuing the causes that were most personal to him, year after year. What can other change-makers take away from Wyss’s example? Don’t feel like you need to solve every problem. And don’t shift your focus constantly, glomming on to the latest cause du jour before moving on to something else. The way to drive the most lasting impact is by applying sustained effort in a few selected areas that matter most to you.
