For All Seasons, Inc., Honors Charlestown's Joy Price for Her Human Services Leadership

CATONSVILLE, MD (January 3, 2017) – Charlestown retirement community resident Joy Price has been honored for her lifelong leadership in the human services system by For All Seasons, Inc., a non-profit mental health and sexual assault center based in Easton, Maryland, that supports women, men, and children.

Price’s vision established the organization, which just received a generous gift to establish an endowment fund in her honor. The Joy Mitchell Price Founders Endowment Fund will exist in perpetuity. The annual earnings from the fund will help support the organization’s operating budget.

As a graduate level social work student in the 1980s, Price identified an important gap in the human service system on the Mid-Shore, and wrote a paper to create a nonprofit organization for victims of rape and sexual assault. With support from her professor Nancy Wilson, and collaborators Maureen Jacobs, Kathleen Francis, and Janet Pfeffer, a new organization – For All Seasons – was formed in 1986.

At the time, rape crisis centers served the western and lower shores of the Chesapeake, but nothing existed in the five counties of the Mid-Shore. Rape and sexual assault were taboo subjects in the common culture at the time. Price said, “When people heard that we were going to work with rape victims, the common response was, ‘Oh, my dear!’ but then there was usually silence.”

It was a slow start, yet Price and her team knew that mental health and advocacy services for victims were desperately needed on the Mid-Shore. They pooled their resources to open a rape crisis center in Easton.

Today, For All Seasons serves over 2,000 Mid-Shore children, teens, men, women and families in offices in each of the five Mid-Shore counties each year. For All Seasons can be found working in collaboration with dozens of other organizations including law enforcement, hospital emergency rooms, 14 schools across the Mid-Shore, community centers, homeless shelters, jails and child advocacy centers. The For All Seasons hotlines provide 24 hour support in English and in Spanish to those in crisis day and night, every day of the year.

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Caption for photo: Charlestown resident Joy Price is honored by For All Seasons, Inc.

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